Double or Nothing
by Fluffy-CSI
Summary: When Ziva steps into the middle of a robbery in her off-hours, the team must unravel the strands of a plot that puts them all in danger.
1. The robbery

"Good morning, Ziva," a voice said as the bell on the front door of the corner store tinkled behind her.

Ziva, whose eyes had been locked onto the cooler at the back that held the bottled Frappucinos, paused and looked over her shoulder. "Oh! _Buenas días_, Carlita!" she exclaimed apologetically. "I am sorry, I didn't see you there."

The older woman snorted good-naturedly. "You are not awake yet, _chiquita_. Do not lie to me," she added, wagging a finger at Ziva as she opened her mouth. "I know you. I see you every morning. You are not awake until you have had your _cafeína_, eh? Go, go." She waved a hand, dismissing Ziva, and bent down to return to inventorying the candy shelves she had been working on when the younger woman entered. "Do not let me keep you from your drug."

Ziva grinned and headed deeper into the store. Carlita Alfaro knew her too well, a side effect of Ziva's daily excursions into her market. Ziva could always be depended upon to appear there in the mornings for her caffeine infusion, and many times she made her way down the block again in the evenings for a forgotten dinner ingredient or six-pack of beer. In the course of their daily interactions, Ziva had learned that Carlita and her husband had emigrated to Washington, D.C. from El Salvador, and now the two women often slipped back into Carlita's native Spanish in their conversations. Ziva considered it good practice; Carlita considered it a welcome reminder of home.

"I am on coffee duty this morning," she called back to Carlita as she leaned into the refrigerated case that held an assortment of bottled sodas and coffee drinks. "Would you mind digging out one of those cardboard...ah..." The English word escaped her, and she switched automatically to Spanish: "_un portovasos_, please?"

"_Claro, claro_." Nodding agreeably, Carlita started to reach under the counter, then paused to talk to a young man who approached the counter. "You are going to be late, Danny!" she admonished the harried-looking twentysomething. "Your work, it starts at eight, yes?"

Danny grimaced. "I know, Mrs. Alfaro. I'm hurrying, I swear. God," he added, running a hand through his hair and leaving it sticking up, "I can't get the hang of this early-morning thing. The senator's going to fire me before long!"

"Bah." Carlita waved a dismissive hand at him. "You are too good for him to fire you. Even if you can't wake up early. If you hurry," she added, leaning forward to get a better look out the front window of the store, "you can catch the next bus. Go on, hurry, you can pay me later." She tried to refuse as he started to count out what he owed her, but he persisted and forced the money for the PowerBar and energy drink into her hand.

Rolling her eyes, Carlita accepted it and deposited it into the cash register. She was just shutting the register's drawer when the front door banged open again, admitting two men. One immediately took up a position next to the door they'd just come through, while the other advanced on Carlita, who was boxed-in behind the counter. Both men showed her handguns tucked into their waistbands under their shirts.

Carlita let out a strangled scream that cut off abruptly as the larger of the two men lunged at her and jumped the counter. Danny scrambled backwards, tripping over his own feet, and fetched up hard against a shelf of potato chip bags, which went down with him.

Ziva, who had been distracted by her struggle with the gummed-up pour spout of the sugar dispenser as she tried to prepare McGee's coffee, immediately dropped the cup and crouched down, only then leaning around a rack of Hostess cakes that separated her from the front of the store to see what had alarmed Carlita. As she watched, the man on the door, gun in one hand, pulled the shade on the door and turned the "Open" sign over, then flipped the lock. Ziva reached for the gun at the small of her back, then thought better of it. There were two of them, two guns, and two potential hostages. No, make that three hostages, she realized as she spotted a teenager in a school uniform staring open-mouthed at the action from further down the line of refrigerators.

She could surely take down one, and possibly both, before they got off a shot, but with three bystanders unable to defend themselves, that was too great a risk to take unless she had to. Ducking back behind her cover, she moved her hand away from the gun and reached instead for her phone. A voice call would give away her presence to the robbers, but a text was probably safe. Her fingers as light on the keys as she could make them, she composed a message to broadcast to Gibbs, DiNozzo, and McGee, "_911 2 men robbery my store NOW"_, and hit _send_. They'd respond, she was sure of that, but there was no way of knowing whether one or all of them might miss the buzz of an arriving text message or how long a trip to her block from wherever they were might take.

Until they arrived, she was on her own. Waving, she caught the eye of the teenaged girl down the aisle. "_Down_," she mouthed, motioning for the girl to squat. Wide-eyed and panicked, the girl hit the deck flat on her face with an audible scrape-click of her watch against the floor tiles. Ziva winced at the noise and froze, as though her lack of sound could compensate for the girl's excess of it.

At the front of the store, Ziva could hear one of the men ordering Carlita to empty the cash register and Carlita sobbing in response. Then a scrape of a footstep coming toward her. Ziva reached for her gun again, then relaxed at the sight of Danny duck-walking toward her, glancing frequently over his shoulder. The teenaged girl looked up and squeaked in reflexive alarm before realizing who was approaching and dropping her head back to the floor. As Danny collapsed beside Ziva, she glared at him for bringing danger to them. The robbers might not have known there were any other people in the store, but they would certainly notice that one of their hostages was missing and come looking for him.

Sure enough, only seconds later, there was a shout and then the sound of approaching footsteps. They were coming. Priorities were changing. Moving quickly, Ziva shot across the floor and planted a boot against the top of the teenager's head. She gave a mighty shove and the girl slid, with almost no resistance, down the slick floor into the next aisle, putting a row of shelving between her and the approaching robber. Hoping the girl would have the good sense to stay put, Ziva scrambled back to where Danny was crouching, staring at her, and settled down next to him, one hand at the small of her back. She was ready.

The man rounded the rack of Twinkies cautiously, gun-first. "Come out, come out, wherever you are," he said in a sing-song voice, then looked down and spotted Ziva and Danny. "Well, well." He motioned with his gun to Danny. "Get away from her."

Danny did as ordered, scooting across the floor until he was clear of Ziva.

"Hey Jimmy!" the robber called, looking over his shoulder for his partner. "Look what I -"

Ziva pounced. She pulled the gun out of its holster at her back in one smooth motion and fired without giving the robber a chance to react. The bullet hit him high on the right shoulder, knocking the gun out of his hand, and she kicked it over toward Danny, who was watching in fascination. "Down," she ordered the howling robber, kicking his feet out from under him. He hit the floor hard, and she stepped deliberately on his gun hand, then pivoted, trying to keep an eye on the rest of the store for his partner. "You!" she barked at Danny, sparing him a glance. "Get his gun!" If Danny could get hold of the robber's gun, even if he didn't know how to use it, that would swing the balance of power in the customers' favor - two of them and two guns, versus the remaining robber and his gun.

Danny just stared at her.

She didn't have time for this, she thought furiously, and reached for the gun herself.

"That'll be all of that," said a cool voice, and she felt the cold metal of a gun barrel against the back of her head. The other robber had flanked them, she had time to realize, and then there was the sound of an explosion, and then darkness.

* * *

A/N: As a reminder, you can follow me on Twitter (username FluffyFanFic) for story updates and my behind-the-writing musings


	2. Rescue

**A/N: For those of you wondering, this story has no connection to any of my other Tiva fics. Everyone's relationships are back to square one.**

* * *

Gibbs screeched his car to a halt outside the 7th Street Market and slammed the transmission into park. Beside him, Tony was on the phone with Metro Police, repeating the address of the store for the third time with impressive calm. They had been the only two people in the office when Ziva's text had come in, and the only conversation they'd bothered to have with each other since they ran for the car had been monosyllabic orders and acknowledgements.

The Metro dispatch center, on the other hand, appeared to need extensive explanations.

"No," Tony told the dispatcher icily, "I did _not _say 'Eastern Market'. I said 'Seventh Street Market.' Again. What? No! Just..." He glanced from Gibbs to the shuttered front of the store. "Just _get _someone here. I've got a federal officer being robbed! _Now!_" Not waiting for the dispatcher's newest round of protests, he flipped the phone closed and dropped it into the car's cup-holder. "How do you want to do this, Boss?"

"There a back door?" Gibbs asked, looking around.

"Yeah, Boss. Delivery door's off the alley in -"

He was interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. They both froze, staring at each other, and then in unison reached for the car doors. "Take the back," Gibbs ordered, unholstering his weapon as he ducked out of the driver's seat.

Tony nodded and unsnapped his own holster, then stiffened at the sound of another shot.

"_Go!_" Gibbs snapped at him, then slid up to the store's front door. Using the opaque concrete to the side of the glass door as cover, he tried to peek through the space between the edge of the door and the shade covering it. He could make out two moving figures, but not well enough to identify either of them. With a gentle push, he tested the door, but it held firm, locked.

Two more shots. There was no more time for recognizance; Ziva needed backup. Returning to the car, he grabbed the closest heavy object, his toolbox, and turned around to heave it through the locked door of the store. The glass shattered explosively, and Gibbs dove through the hole it opened in the door, rolled, and came up to his feet with his gun in his hand.

There was silence from the inside of the store, broken only by the sound of quiet sobbing from the back. No one was visible above the shelves that filled the room.

Tony appeared from the stock room, fanning his gun across the open space. "Clear!" he called to Gibbs.

"Drop your weapons!" Gibbs ordered the room at large. "Federal agents!"

The crying grew louder, and a gun clattered to the floor. "It's ok," a male voice called. "It's over. I...I think I killed them."

The two agents exchanged a look and made for the source of the voice, guns still at the ready. Rounding the corner of a shelf cautiously, Gibbs pulled to a stop at the same time Tony tried to. Tony's foot, though, came down in a red-stained pile of sugar - the remains of one of the containers that had serviced the coffee bar - and shot out from under him. He hit the ground in a lunge and skidded to a stop a foot from where a knot of people were hunched over a still figure. "Federal agents!" he said, scrambling back to his feet, and a face looked up from the crowd.

"Help her," begged Carlita, holding out a bloodied hand to him. Instinctively, Tony reached for it. He knew that behind him, Gibbs was clearing the rest of the store, but he blocked that out and focused on the people on the ground. Gibbs could take care of himself; Tony would concern himself with the crowd. And where the hell was Ziva? He stepped toward the group and at the sight of him it dissolved into only three people, far fewer than he had assumed, surrounding a still, dark-haired form on the ground.

"Ziva!" The witnesses forgotten, he dropped to his knees, not noticing the pool of blood he was sinking into, and reached for her.

"Help her!" Carlita sobbed again, reaching out to clutch the lapel of his coat with one hand. "_Por favor, ayudale, por favor, ella me protegía_, _no dejes que se muera_..." Her Spanish got progressively more incomprehensible from there, and Tony stopped listening.

Ziva wasn't moving, but Tony's police training kicked in and he knew he had to secure his team's safety before he could care any further for Ziva. "Everyone up!" he ordered the small group, all of whom were still staring at him from the floor. "_¡Levántate!" _he added for Carlita's benefit, not knowing if she spoke any English. He had occasionally encountered her when he came into the store with Ziva in the past, but the women had always spoken Spanish to each other, and too quickly for him to even attempt to follow.

Reacting slowly to his order, the teenaged girl and the young man got to their feet. As the young man stood up, Tony caught sight of a gun on the floor beside him. He kicked it away, out of the reach of the group, and called over his shoulder, "Boss, got a gun on the floor here."

Gibbs appeared around the corner and bent down to look at the weapon. He eyed it for a second, then flipped on the safety, stood up, and placed himself between it and the witnesses. "Looks like hers. We've got two dead down the aisle and a police unit pulling up outside. You got cuffs on you, DiNozzo?"

Tony reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pair, which he tossed to Gibbs, then returned his attention to the woman on the floor. Extracting his own pair from a pocket, Gibbs nodded to the two young people. "Turn around, please, folks."

"What?" the girl gasped, staring at the cuffs in his hand. "We didn't do anything!"

"Probably not," Gibbs replied calmly, "but I've got an agent down and at least one uncontrolled weapon in this shop. Everyone's getting cuffed until we figure this out." And without waiting for further comment, he gently cuffed the girl, who sobbed but made no move to resist him. "You next," he told the man, who held out his hands obligingly.

"I shot them," he babbled. "The robbers, they shot her, and then I saw her gun, and I picked it up, and I shot the guy who shot her, and the other guy, she shot him but then I shot him too, and -"

"Enough," Gibbs interrupted, taking him by the arm and pulling him out of his way. "You can talk all you want about it later." He looked down at the matronly woman still babbling in Spanish on the floor and motioned to her to stand. "Ma'am. You, too. _Usted también._"

Carlita shook her head without looking away from Ziva. "She is bleeding," she said in clear English, surprising both men. "I must care for her."

"Ma'am -" Gibbs glanced over his shoulder warily, then looked back at Carlita. His gut said she wasn't dangerous, but if Ziva had gotten caught out in this store, so could they, and he wouldn't relax his guard until everyone who was not one of his agents was secured.

"I'll get this, Boss," Tony spoke up without looking away from Carlita and Ziva.

Gibbs nodded and looked over his shoulder again. "Do it," he told Tony.

Tony knelt down and lowered his head until he was in the older woman's line of sight. "I'll take over here, ok?" he said reassuringly, reaching for where she was supporting Ziva's head. "I'll take care of her. You go with him." He gestured toward Gibbs.

Carlita blinked at him for a second, then swallowed and inclined her head in a small nod. She carefully transferred her grip on Ziva to Tony, then lifted herself to her feet, whispering a prayer. Gibbs, realizing he was short on handcuffs, took hold of her elbow and looked over at the two other witnesses. "Move 'em out, folks," he ordered, and led the group toward the store's front door, calling out, "NCIS Special Agent Gibbs coming through with witnesses!" to the police he knew must be there by now.

Within seconds, Tony was alone with Ziva's unmoving body. His hand was cupping the back of her head, and he could feel warm blood still coursing out of her wound. As he shifted his weight to his knees, her head moved in spite of his caution with it, leaving red-painted streaks on the floor as her hair dragged across the tile. "Oh, god," he muttered, knowing there was nothing he could do for her except try to stop the blood from draining out. Her face was chalky, and as he looked down at her, he realized just how large the pool of blood she lay in was.

Tony pressed the cloth Carlita had left him more tightly against Ziva's head.

* * *

_End note: Don't give up on Ziva yet, folks! She's a fighter!_


	3. In the waiting room

Half an hour later, Abby tore into the hospital still dressed in her funeral-gown pajamas, although she had had the presence of mind to throw a long trenchcoat over the ensemble. She attempted to skid to a stop halfway into the waiting room when she spotted McGee, but her shoes got no purchase on the polished hospital floors and she slid the rest of the way into him. "How is she?" she was demanding before she even got her face out of his t-shirt.

"I don't know, Abby," he admitted. "I didn't see the scene. Tony's inside with her, and I didn't get a good look when they brought her in, but..." He swallowed. "There was a lot of blood."

"Well, where's Gibbs?" She looked around the room, seeing no one else she recognized. "Is he in there too? Maybe we can send a nurse in the get him and - no," she interrupted herself absently, "why are we out here to begin with? Why is only Tony in there? I want to see her!" She gave his shoulder a shove in an attempt to get past him, but McGee refused to be moved.

"Abby. Abby!" He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. "We are out here because there's no room in there, ok? There are doctors working on every inch of her. There's no room for spectators."

"But Tony -"

"Is _Tony_," he finished firmly. "He'll take care of her. You and I need to stay out here and stay calm, ok?"

Abby shook her head, refusing to take in his words. "No!" she protested, stomping her foot. "_Where's Gibbs_?"

"Here, Abs," Gibbs said quietly, appearing behind her.

"Gibbs!" She whirled around and had thrown herself into his arms before she was even finished saying his name. "Tell me Ziva's going to be ok!"

The cups of machine-dispensed coffee Gibbs held in both hands sloshed dangerously as Abby's weight hit him and, holding his arms out to avoid spilling on her, he motioned for McGee to take one of the cups.

McGee took a cup, then looked confusedly down at it. "You need milk in this or something, Boss?"

"No," Gibbs said simply, and lifted his own cup. "It's for you." With one hand now free, he wrapped it around Abby's shoulders reassuringly.

McGee stammered for a second, then managed an appreciative nod. "Thanks," he said, taking a sip of coffee so black he would normally have turned his nose up at it. In this situation, however, he would gladly take what Gibbs gave him.

"You're going to need it."

"Uh..." His eyes slid sideways as he instinctively sought an escape for whatever that statement was a lead-in to, and he lowered the coffee cup again suspiciously. "Why?"

"Because you and I are going over to process that store," Gibbs replied, downing the rest of his coffee in one gulp. "As soon as you're done with your coffee," he added, looking pointedly at McGee's still-full cup. "I don't trust Metro to have a handle on this."

"What?" Abby exclaimed, pulling out from under his arm to look at him incredulously. "You can't just - Ziva's in there!" she said, gesturing wildly to the closed emergency room doors. "What if she wakes up?"

"Tony's with her," Gibbs replied implacably. "He's going to stay with her. He'll keep us informed while McGee and I do what we need to do."

Abby stared at him, stung by his calm manner. "And that's fine for you?" she asked coldly. "You don't want to be with her? You just want someone to 'inform' you if she dies?" Her voice cracked on the last word.

Gibbs handed his coffee cup to McGee, who took it silently, and put his hands on Abby's shoulders. "She's not gonna die, Abs."

"Kate did!" she wailed, giving voice to the fear that all of them had been trying to suppress. She felt the tears that she had been fighting start to fall. "I don't think I can do this again, Gibbs," she whispered, pressing her face back into his shoulder.

He forced her head up again and met her eyes. "I know," he told her quietly, and wrapped her in a tight hug before turning away and heading for the waiting room exit. "Let's go, McGee. Abby," he added over his shoulder, "I'm going to need you at NCIS to process evidence when McGee and I get back there." He looked meaningfully from her to the doors leading to the emergency room area. "Don't let me down, Abs."

"I won't." Lips pressed tightly together, Abby managed a nod before returning to being afraid of what lay behind those doors.


	4. Examination

Tony stood just inside the curtain that blocked Ziva from the rest of the emergency room, watching the organized chaos surrounding his partner. Three nurses had formed an impromptu bucket brigade of gauze pads, passing clean handfuls down the line and bloody ones back in the other direction to be disposed of in the biohazard container next to Tony. An orderly constantly scuttled through line, picking up blood-soaked pads that hadn't made it and generally doing his best to keep any of the medical personnel from setting a foot down on a slippery spot and putting themselves out of commission.

A grey-haired doctor stood at Ziva's head, surveying the attempts to stop the bleeding. "Hold it," he ordered, and all but one of the gauze brigade stepped away from the bed. The remaining nurse kept a large wad of gauze pressed as tightly as she could against Ziva's head, but attempted to ease her body out of the doctor's way. The doctor, his blue scrubs lightly smeared with blood, leaned down to inspect the wound. "It's slowing down. What's her name, again?"

"Ziva," the nurse replied, then looked to Tony for approval of how she had pronounced the foreign-sounding name.

When Tony nodded that she had gotten it right, the doctor leaned around the nurse and put his face an inch from Ziva's. "Ziva. Ziva, can you hear me?"

No response. The doctor didn't seem to have expected one, because he quickly straightened up and started dispensing orders to the assembled staff. "Hannah, type and cross-match. Raoul, go with her, call the blood bank, get some units up here."

Two nurses nodded and turned to go. Tony stopped one of them, grabbing the sleeve of her teddy-bear scrubs. "She's AB-negative," he blurted, hoping to save her and the blood-typing process some time.

The woman nodded, thanked him, and disappeared through the curtain. Tony got the distinct impression that whether or not she believed him, she wasn't going to take his word for it.

"Andy," the doctor went on without looking up.

The orderly scrambled to his feet, one gloved hand filled with bloody gauze, and said, "Yo."

"Once this bleeding stops, I want a look inside her head. Call up to CT, let them know we'll be coming."

"Got it." Andy followed Hannah out of the cubicle, pausing only to dump his load of gauze into the biohazard can.

"How long has she been out?" the doctor asked. Silence. He jerked his head up and caught Tony's eye before trying again: "You. You came in with her - did she regain consciousness at any point? How long has she been out?"

Taken aback at his sudden inclusion in the action of the room, Tony fumbled for an answer. "Uh..." He looked at his watch, its face half-obscured by a drying smear of Ziva's blood. It had cost him $350. He wondered if it was rated to work submerged in blood. Blood was way more viscous than water, after all.

_What did that matter?_ he realized, snapping back to reality. Pulling his mind away from the macabre thoughts, he did his best to answer the doctor's question: "She was unconscious when we got to her - um, maybe half an hour ago? - and no, she hasn't woken up. I was talking to her most of the way here, and if she'd been awake she would have tried to shut me up, or maybe tried to hit me, so I don't -"

The doctor, looking mildly amused at the sudden torrent of words, held up a hand to stop him. "Ok. Thank you." He turned to look at the nurse who was continuing her pressure on the wound. "Definitely going to need a CT. How's it look down there, Kat?"

The nurse peeled back the edge of the gauze she was holding. "Better. Ziva?" she tried again, leaning forward. "Ziva, your head has almost stopped bleeding, ok? We're going to take a closer look now, honey."

There was a faint moan. Everyone froze for a second, and then exploded back into action. "Ziva?" the nurse repeated at the same time as the doctor grabbed a penlight out of his pocket reached to take the gauze from her.

The moan grew louder. "Ziva, you're in a hospital," the nurse said reassuringly. "You have a head injury, but we're taking care of you, ok?" She reached out to touch Ziva's hand, laying limply on the bedsheets. "Can you squeeze my hand?"

The almost undetectable moan exploded into a hoarse scream, and the doctor lifted his hands away from her head apologetically. "Sorry, Ziva, that was me poking around. I'll be more careful from now on."

"She squeezed," the nurse announced excitedly. "Good girl, Ziva. I'm Kat, and I'm a nurse. Do you know where you are?"

Ziva mumbled something indecipherable.

"That's ok, close enough," Kat assured her kindly. "I know, we never give anyone time to wake up before we start -"

"Holy shit." The doctor broke off halfway through the curse and looked up self-consciously at his audience. "Kat, look at this." The nurse scrambled to look where he was pointing. "There's no penetration." He looked over at Tony, who was having limited success parsing that statement. "You said she was shot, right?"

"That's what the witnesses said. There was a gun at the scene. And the way she was bleeding..."

The doctor smiled, suddenly looking more relaxed than he had since he entered the room. "I think," he said, leaning back over Ziva, "that you have dodged a bullet, young lady. Literally."

"She wasn't shot?" Tony managed to get out, eyes on the blood-stained sheets under Ziva. "Then why -"

"Oh, she was shot." The doctor squatted down and aimed his penlight at the back of Ziva's head for a closer look. "But either the guy had bad aim or our Miss Ziva has some ninja-like skills, because she managed to dodge the worst of it. She's got a big furrow in her scalp and probably took a bad knock in the head from the force of the impact, but unless the CT scan tells us differently, I don't think there's a bullet here. I think it buzzed her. We just couldn't tell that until we got the bleeding stopped."

Wanting a closer look at this miracle, Tony walked toward bed, but quickly found himself blocked as the doctor extended an arm between him and Ziva. "It just clipped her?" he asked, leaning around the arm. "So she's ok?"

"Well, I wouldn't say she's automatically 'ok'," the doctor replied, dropping his arm so the nurse could move to stand by Ziva's head and whisper to her. "But she's certainly more fine than she would have been if she was standing a few millimeters in the other direction. Bullets pack a big wallop, though," he added hastily as Tony, practically dripping relief, started to speak. "Even a graze can have the effect of some pretty heavy-duty blunt force trauma. And she's lost a lot of blood out of the wound. She's not going to be walking out of here anytime soon."

"But she's not - there's no bullet there," Tony tried again, still trying to convince himself of it. "So she's not going to have any..." He swallowed. "No brain damage or anything?"

Ziva mumbled something inaudible from the bed. "She says she can hear you," the nurse translated, smiling. Another mumble. The nurse blinked and looked from Ziva to Tony. "And that she isn't the one with a damaged brain. I'm not sure what she means by that."

Tony's face broke into a smile. "I am."


	5. Turf wars

"I don't _care_ that this store is your turf," Gibbs snapped, poking a finger into the chest of the Metro Police detective who was challenging his right to enter the scene. "The victim is _my_ turf. And I want _my_ investigators working this. _My_ -"

"Hello, Jethro. Any news of Ziva?"

Gibbs stopped mid-tirade to turn and look at Ducky, making his usual belated entrance. "Hey, Duck. Haven't heard anything yet. There's two dead down the aisle, though."

"Right you are." Ducky turned toward the bodies, but was stopped by the sudden appearance of the detective, who sidestepped in front of him. "What's this?"

The detective, a burly man in his mid-50s, crossed his arms and stood his ground, scowling down at the much-smaller doctor. "You are not authorized to enter this crime scene, sir."

"Oh, bollocks." Uncharacteristically, Ducky pushed past the sizable detective, banging his field case into the detective's knee as he passed.

"Ow! What -?" The detective grabbed his leg as Ducky blew past him, then, with a concerted effort, straightened up and looked at Gibbs with his eyes narrowed. "I want him - and you - out of here, Agent Gibbs! This is _not_ your scene!"

"Better check with your commanding officer about that," Gibbs replied, slapping his cell phone into the detective's chest. "I'll wait."

Blinking, the detective opened the phone and dialed a number. "Captain!" he said when whoever was on the other end answered. "Sir, I have an NCIS agent here at the armed robbery. He's demanding access to the scene; says one of his agents was - yes," he broke off, listening. "Yes, sir, but this is my - who? He did?" His face reddened slightly. "I know, sir, and I'm willing to cooperate but -" Silence. "I see. Thank you, sir." Chastened, he closed the phone and handed it back to Gibbs without meeting the other man's eyes.

"Well?" Gibbs demanded when the detective, still ignoring him, started to walk away.

Grumbling indecipherably, the detective lifted a hand and waved Gibbs toward the bodies.

* * *

"Ah, James." Ducky set down his field case on the floor next to the kneeling Metro medical examiner, who was already examining one of the bodies. "What have we got, here?"

"Dr. Mallard!" James Carroll looked up in surprise. "To what do I owe this pleasure?" Mentally sorting through the possibilities of what would have gotten Ducky to the store, Carroll hit on a likely one and his face fell. "Oh, no. Neither of these guys is one of yours, are they?"

Ducky shook his head and eased himself to the floor. "No. The one who lived is."

"Ah, the heroine." Carroll smiled and, noticing Ducky's confusion, indicated where the Metro detectives were still interviewing witnesses. "Couldn't help overhearing the witnesses' stories. They're all pretty sure someone would have died if she didn't act. How badly is she injured?"

Pursing his lips, Ducky just shook his head again. "I'm not sure. I've gotten all my news second-hand, and now even the second-hand news sources are waiting on word from the hospital." Swallowing, he did his best to switch his attention to the body on the ground. "What have we got here?"

"Pretty straightforward causes of death, from the looks of it. This guy has two bullet wounds in the forehead. His buddy over there, one in the shoulder and one in the back of the head." He inserted a liver probe, then looked up at Ducky. "Are our friends here going to be my problem, or yours?"

"Actually, I'm not sure. Jeth-" he began, turning to call Gibbs only to find him standing mere inches away. "Oh, there you are. How did you work things out with our detective friend over there?"

Gibbs nodded to Carroll. "They're ours for now, doctor. But Ducky - keep Dr. Carroll informed. We're...cooperating on this case."

"As you wish," said Carroll, easing away from the body to allow Ducky better access. "Donald," he said with a gentlemanly sweep of his hand, "they're all yours."

"Why, thank you." Ducky smiled and leaned forward to read the temperature the liver probe was displaying. "Ah, 97.5. A reasonable number for the time frame. I take it," he said, settling back on his heels and looking at the frustrated-looking Metro detective across the room and then at Gibbs, "that the director came through for you?"

Gibbs nodded. "For once."

Smiling slightly, Ducky returned his attention to the body. "Nice to see you boys playing well together. You'll let me know about Ziva, won't you?" he asked as Gibbs turned to go.

"You got it, Duck."

* * *

**A/N: Yeah, nothing momentous here, just some filler we had to get through to move on to the meat of the scene**


	6. Carrie

McGee approached their teenage witness carefully. The girl's mother had sped to the scene after receiving a call from her daughter, and he was now faced with the task of interviewing the girl under the watchful eye of mommy. The two women were huddled together in the back of an ambulance parked on the street in front of the store - one of two ambulances that had responded to the robbery. There were still tire marks in the frost that showed where another ambulance had parked before whisking Ziva away to the hospital. The remaining ambulance crew, after verifying the deaths of both robbers, had taken up the task of checking the witnesses to make sure no one else had been injured.

The teenager, who gave her name as Carrie MacAllen, had been medically cleared, but when the ambulance crew saw how hard her thin body was shaking, they had insisted she wrap up in a large blanket and stay put inside the warm ambulance while she answered the investigators' questions. The crew was now around the front of the ambulance, checking over Carlita Alfaro; they were accommodating enough to leave McGee and Gibbs to their work.

Even so, McGee didn't exactly look forward to interviewing a teenage girl who looked like he could break her with one harsh word. She probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet, and against her pale skin, her dark hair, which seemed to have started the day braided into girlish pigtails, only gave her more of a look of fragile innocence. One braid had come loose now, and strands hung down her cheek, matted with dried tears and dust from the floor she'd been lying on during the robbery. Her mother didn't look much more put-together. The woman had obviously been crying along with her daughter, and her hair was in a messy approximation of a ponytail that she must have thrown together on her way to the scene.

As McGee watched, the two women's conversation changed from comforting to heated. "You don't _understand_," Carrie exclaimed, pulling out of her mother's arms to give her a wounded look. "She saved me! The guy was coming around the corner, and she pushed me out of the way and put herself in my place!" She threw out an arm dramatically, making a bat-like figure with the blanket she had wrapped around herself and almost hitting her mother. "I can't go home until someone tells me if she's ok!" She wrapped the blanket back around herself and looked around for someone who could tell her Ziva's condition. Her gaze fell on McGee, watching from a few feet away. "Are you with the police?" she called to him. "I need to...can you tell me..." A new tear trickled down her face and soaked immediately into the stray lock of hair from her braid. "Is she ok?"

"We..." He sighed. "We don't know yet. She's at the hospital now."

"But she's still alive? For now, at least?" Carrie persisted, leaning forward. She shivered and adjusted the blanket as a gust of cool air blew into the ambulance.

McGee noticed that her hands were shaking, despite the folds of blanket she had them fisted in; she was cold from terror, not from the weather. He hated interviewing victims who hadn't had time to decompress. It rarely yielded anything and it only scared them further. But he had been ordered to talk to her, and he wasn't going back to Gibbs to protest that assignment. So, he talked: "She's alive, yes. Miss MacAllen, I'm Special Agent McGee. I'm with NCIS. I worked - I _work_ - with Ziva."

Carrie blinked. "Ziva?"

She didn't know the name of the woman who'd helped her, he realized. "Ziva David. The woman who shot the robber, that's her name. She's an NCIS agent too."

"Is that why you're investigating this?" asked Mrs. MacAllen, looking up. "Instead of the police?"

"Yes, ma'am. Carrie," he went on, transferring his attention to the teenager, "I'd like to ask you some questions about what happened this morning. Do you think you're up to that?" He wiggled his notepad at her hopefully.

Carrie shifted her weight on the ambulance seat, swallowed, and nodded. "Yes." Her voice faltered and she cleared her throat and tried again: "Yes. I want to help. Please."

"Carrie..." her mother said quietly, putting an arm back around her daughter's shoulders, "we don't have to do this now. You can -"

"No!" She turned on her mother with a fierce expression. "She might not even live, and she hid me from them! I want to help her! And this will help her!" When Mrs. MacAllen, obviously thinking better of her attempts to protect her child, held up her hands in surrender, Carrie looked back to McGee. "They're heroes, you know. Her and Danny Weiss."

"Is that the guy who shot the man who shot Ziva?"

Carrie nodded. "He lives in the same building as me. They're both _heroes_!" she said again, as if she expected him to disagree with her.

McGee nodded and flipped his notepad open, trying to keep his impatience in check. He needed to know _facts_, not hear vague statements about how heroic anyone was. But the poor girl was still shaking; he couldn't very well tell her to skip past the marveling and move on to the actual specifics of what had happened. The most guidance he would be able to get away with was some gently-pointed questions, so he tried one of those: "Carrie, what were you doing when the robbers came in?" he rushed to squeeze in now before she started talking again.

Carrie blinked at him, her train of thought derailed. "I was looking for something for breakfast. I was standing by the rack of cereals - you know, the ones that come in those plastic cups, so you can pour milk right inside?"

McGee nodded.

"Well, I was trying to decide between raisin bran or corn pops, and then there was this loud bang when they pushed open the door, and Mrs. Alfaro screamed, and I looked up. And there were these two big guys -"

"The guys whose bodies are in the store now?" he prompted.

"Yeah, them. I mean, at least I guess so, I haven't looked at their faces now. It's..." She shuddered and rubbed at her eyes with the heel of one hand. "The mess in there, and I...I had no idea people's heads blew up like that when they got shot, they don't do that in GTA, at least not so _messy_, and I just...I had no idea. I don't want to look at them now. I don't have to look at them now, do I?"

"No," McGee assured her, shaking his head. "Tell me what Agent David did when the robbers came in."

She thought about that, then turned up her hands. "I don't know. I didn't see her. I mean, she was doing something with coffee, I think, but I wasn't paying attention. I was focused on my cereal, and then on the guys who were showing the guns." She sighed, screwing up her face apologetically. "I didn't see her until she started waving at me."

"Waving?"

"Yeah, like this." The teenager demonstrated, flattening her hand and waving it up and down, parallel to the ground. "Like, 'get down! get down!', you know?"

He nodded again, eyes on his notepad. "And did you do what she said?"

Eyes wide, Carrie nodded vehemently. "I hit the ground so fast, I think I scared her! I thought maybe if I - I mean..." She bit her lip. "I kind of instinctively thought that if I made myself look smaller, they wouldn't see me even if they looked back there. But then I had my head down and I couldn't see, so I was just listening, but when you can't _see_...everything you _hear_ is suddenly really horrible and scary. And so I kept trying to see without actually picking up my head, but that didn't..." She shrugged. "Didn't really work, you know?"

"Yep." She was on a roll now; he wasn't going to distract her with any more words than necessary.

"So then I heard footsteps, and I -" She broke off, her throat working as if she was trying to stave off the need to vomit. Her mother patted her hand comfortingly and after a few seconds, Carrie finally seemed able to swallow. "I don't even know how to explain how scared I was. Because I knew that the only people walking around were the people who _shouldn't_ be walking around, you know, it's not like they were going to let Mrs. Alfaro wander around the store while they were holding guns on her!" She tightened the blanket around her shoulders at the memory. "And I was starting to look up, but then the next thing I knew she - Agent David, you said is her name? - she put her foot on my shoulder and, like, kicked me over to the next aisle, so I was out of sight of the guy who came looking for us."

"Looking for who?" McGee asked, looking up.

"Oh." She looked confused. "You know, for other people in the store. I guess they didn't want us calling 9-1-1 or anything."

McGee thought about that. She could be guessing correctly; on the other hand, he needed to rule out the possibility that the robbers had been looking for an associate, or a particular victim. "So he didn't look like they wanted anyone in particular?"

Carrie shook her head. "I don't...think so? No, I don't know," she admitted with a shake of her head. "I mean, it wasn't like either of them said anyone's name or anything, and I couldn't really see well by that point even when I looked up, because I was behind the shelf. But it makes sense, right? That they would want to make sure no one was hiding in the store, calling the police?" She shrugged. "I don't know why else they would have come back there - all the money was in the cash register up front, not back by where we were."

"Well, did he say anything, anything at all, once he got back there?" he pressed.

"Nothing important," she replied immediately, then paused to give more thought to her hasty answer. "I mean, at least I don't think it was important. He said something about how he found us, and he called the other guy over, and..." She closed her eyes, remembering, and flinched. "And then they started shooting at each other."

"The robbers?"

"No. I mean yes. I mean, the woman - Agent David - shot the one guy, and then his friend, he shot her." Her voice dried up there, and she hiccuped.

McGee offered her the bottle of water that was sitting by her feet, and she gladly took it and drank a large mouthful. "Did you see them shoot each other?" he asked after she had swallowed and set the bottle down on the seat.

"Not exactly. I didn't see her shoot him. I didn't know it was going to happen, and I was still hiding. But then when I heard the sound - the gunshot - and she started yelling, I thought maybe she had things under control. And I looked around the corner of the shelf and I -" She drew in a choking breath, then let it out on a sob. "I looked just in time to see him shoot her," she said, covering her face with shaking hands.

He watched her cry, unsure whether to try to continue questioning her or not. Her mother was directing an exquisitely clear _back off _look at him, but he couldn't just leave this interview unfinished. He needed to know what had happened next - had Ziva simply gone down without a fight? Had she shot one or both of the robbers again before losing consciousness? Or was what the young Hill staffer had babbled true - had he somehow managed to shoot two armed men, despite no evident weapons training? "Carrie," he finally said gently, touching her arm to get her attention. "This is very important, ok? I need you to tell me what you saw after Agent David was shot."

She lifted a pathetic, tear-stained face to look at him. Her inexpertly-applied eye makeup now ringed her eyes where she had been rubbing at them. "I..." Her breathing hitched. "I don't know what I saw! I don't know if I saw anything! I think I hid again - they were shooting guns at each other! I was so...so _afraid_!" she wailed, disgusted at herself for her instinctive actions. "I was scared and I hid and I didn't see anything that means anything!"

He wasn't going to get anything else out of her, he realized. She was frustrated, he was frustrated, and his questions now were only making things worse.

Reluctantly, he backed off.

"Ok, Carrie. That's ok. We can come back to it another time. Why don't you and your mom head home." He looked up at her mother, whose face had softened now that her daughter was no longer under what felt like an attack. "We'll need to speak to her again, ma'am."

"I know." The woman nodded and wrapped her arm tighter around her daughter. "But...tomorrow. Please."

Stifling his frustration, McGee nodded and watched the pair go. Then, when they were out of sight, he spiked his notepad into the ground and gave vent to what he had been holding back since the girl had started crying: "_Goddamnit!_"

"Hey," said a sharp voice from behind him. He turned to see Gibbs pointing down at the notepad. "This ain't the Super Bowl. Pick that thing up."

Sighing, McGee did as ordered. "Sorry, Boss," he said, as he grabbed the pad off the ground. "It's just - I didn't get anything good out of the girl, and for all we know Ziva's dying, and -"

Gibbs slapped him on the back of the head as he made to stand up again, and if McGee's reflexes hadn't already been attuned to head-slaps, he would have fallen over instead of just lurching forward and then catching himself. Then Gibbs surprised him: "I know," he said quietly, making McGee, who had just started to straighten up again, stop halfway and stare at him. "But this isn't the time. Do your cursing once we're clear of the scene. Hell, I might join you then."

McGee, who had reached up to rub his sore head, dropped his hand and swallowed. The last time Gibbs had spoken to him that tolerantly, it had been pouring rain outside and Caitlin Todd's body had been in the morgue. "She's dead, isn't she?"

Gibbs blinked. "What?"

"You're..." He gestured helplessly. "You're being too nice. It's like when Kate - oof!" he broke off as that earned him another whack to the head.

"She's not dead," Gibbs said firmly, lowering his hand. "She's not _gonna_ be dead. Ziva follows my orders, and I did not give her _permission_ to be dead. You got that, McGee?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Boss." Busying himself with flipping the pages in his now-dusty notepad, McGee nodded. "I've got it."

"Good. Now, go do photos while I interview the cashier."

"Yes, Boss."


	7. Two phones

McGee adjusted the camera strap where it was digging into his neck and tried to focus on the scene he was supposed to be photographing. Most of the store looked untouched, as if nothing had been different this morning than any other morning, but he knew as soon as he turned the corner toward the refrigerators, that would change. He'd already seen the carnage once, as he did a walkthrough after his arrival. Now, he needed to not only see it, but study it through his camera. It was important, and he knew that, but that didn't make the prospect of photographing a pool of Ziva's blood any easier to stomach.

He took a deep breath and forced himself to round the Hostess rack toward the area of the shootings. Doing his best to observe the scene with an investigatory eye, he lifted the camera and began shooting.

_A spilled cup of coffee lying on the ground, undissolved sugar peeking out of the cup and beginning to harden in the pool of machine-made cappucino._ He crouched down to get a better angle and snapped a picture. The cup had rolled across the floor from where Ziva had been standing, preparing the four cups she would bring to work with her, when she dropped it. She'd only gotten as far as filling cup number one.

_A small pile of still-wrapped Twinkies that had been knocked off the shelf by someone rounding the corner too tightly._ Snap. Someone had come around the rack in a rush. Friend or foe?

He straightened up and turned slowly in a circle until he was looking at the coffee prep area. _Two fallen canisters of sugar, one with a bullet hole through its center still standing by the coffee machine and one that had burst open as it fell to the ground. Their contents had mixed into a pile on the ground._ They must have been situated behind at least one of the people who took a bullet; the sugar that had spilled out onto the floor was stained red with someone's blood. He shot a photo of the whole area, then leaned over for a closer shot of the canister that had taken the bullet. He could just make out a slug buried in the sugar that remained in the canister. He took a picture of that too.

"Ducky?" he called as he lowered the camera.

The medical examiner looked up from the body he was checking over a few feet away. "Yes, Timothy?"

"Got a bullet here. Any of your bodies missing one?"

Ducky blinked, then looked down at his body. "As a matter of fact, yes. John Doe Number One here has a through-and-through in the shoulder." With a groan, he adjusted his position to get a closer look at the wound. "Perfectly placed to hit nothing in particular of any use."

McGee nodded and lined up the camera for another shot. "I think that's Ziva's bullet in his shoulder. The girl says Ziva had him down before his buddy came around and surprised her." Confident he had documented the bullet's original location well enough now, he picked up the sugar canister and bagged it.

The doctor pursed his lips and looked back down. "Unusually bad aim for her, isn't it?"

"I don't think she was going for a kill shot." He lowered the camera again and narrowed his eyes, trying to visualize the scene as it had been at the moment of the shooting. "If she wanted to kill him, she would have. She was probably trying to disable his gun hand."

"Yes, I suppose you're right." Ducky wedged one hand under the body and began to lift it to get a better look at the shoulder's exit wound, then paused at the unexpected lump he felt in the man's pocket. "Hello, what's this?"

"What?"

"I believe I've found our friend's cellular phone. Would you -"

"Hold it," McGee interrupted, taking a quick step toward him. "Let me get a picture."

Between the two of them, they managed to get photos of the phone in every stage between being a lump in the man's pocket and a full-fledged phone in the doctor's hand. Finally, Ducky sat back on his heels and held the phone out to the younger man, carefully arranging his fingers around where blood from the pool the body was in had leaked onto the back.

McGee handed him the bag containing the sugar canister in exchange. "This needs to go to Abby," he said without looking up from the phone's interface. It was a touch-screen model unfamiliar to him, and he had to do a little hunting to find the useful areas. After a series of misguided clicks and a disbelieving laugh he couldn't stifle at the phone's wallpaper of a tiny, fuzzy kitten, he finally zeroed in on the messaging menu. "He's been texting up a storm," he remarked as he eyed the long list of message headers. "It's like - Ducky?" he broke off as he belatedly noticed his lack of audience. Looking around, he found the doctor focused on the second body's head wound and no longer paying attention to him.

Lowering his voice, McGee settled for talking to himself as he examined the phone. "Texts came from a variety of contacts...'Mom,' 'Angie,' 'Harry'..." He selected a text marked "Harry" and opened it to find a surprisingly normal note regarding who was providing the beer for a night on the town. "With friends like these..." he mused, closing that text and moving down the reverse-sorted list looking for anything that looked less normal. He stopped on the last text the phone had received, which had a _From _field that contained a phone number, not a name - which meant it was a message from someone who wasn't in the phone's contacts.

He opened the text with a click, read it, and nearly dropped the phone. As he scrambled to keep it from hitting the ground, his fingers hit a half-dry blood stain on the back and he nearly lost it again. He made a last, desperate grab for it, managed to get a good hold, and looked down to find that his grabbing fingers had managed to tell the phone to call the number associated with the highlighted message. "Shit, shit, shit -" He fumbled to find a button on the keyboard that would disconnect the call before it went through.

At the front of the store, a phone started playing a cheerful beeping ringtone.

Startled by the confluence of circumstances, McGee looked up at the noise and then down at the phone he was holding, finally spotted the "end call" button, and hit it.

The ringing stopped.

To test the hypothesis that had just occurred to him, he hit "send" again.

The ringing re-started.

Sure now, he started tracking the noise. It was definitely coming from close to the door, which meant the ringing phone wasn't on the other body, which lay mere feet away. He walked out of the aisle, into the open floor space, and paused to listen again.

Whoever the phone belonged to, they had boring taste in ringtones - he recognized the tone as a common one that many phone defaulted to. He continued tracking, around the Hostess rack, down a wall lined with soda machines, and toward the register. He paused there as the phone skipped to voicemail and the ringing stopped, then he hung up and re-dialed to start it up again. A musical intro played, and he listened closely. No, it wasn't behind the register. It was further away. He passed the register and paused again in the doorway. Yes, now it was closer - almost right next to him. He looked around and spotted a pile of garbage bags near the curb in front of the store. The ringing was coming from there. Ignoring the curious looks bystanders were giving him, he closed in on the trash pile and started lifting up bags. The third one he lifted revealed a small, silver phone.

McGee smiled victoriously and lifted the camera from around his neck. "Gotcha." He photographed the phone, then bagged it. He was just lowering the camera when he spotted Gibbs disengaging from his interview with Carlita Alfaro. "Boss!" he called, waving him over. "Found something!"

Gibbs jogged over and pulled to a stop a few feet from McGee, raising his eyebrows at the phones the other man had in each hand.

"This," McGee explained, holding up the bloodied phone, "was found in the pocket of John Doe the robber. While I was checking out the text messages on it, I found one from a number that wasn't identified in the contacts list, and -"

"In English, McGee."

In answer, he navigated back to the messaging menu, opened the text message that had set this whole sequence off, and turned the phone so that Gibbs could read it.

Gibbs took the phone and squinted at the small text on the screen. " 'She's here'," he read. " 'Move in now'." Eyes narrowed thoughtfully, he handed the phone back to McGee. "When was that sent?"

McGee turned the phone back to himself and read the smaller print that was showing under the message. "Seven-oh-two this morning. Which...here, hold this." He handed the bagged cell phone to Gibbs and reached into his pocket for his own phone. With a few taps on the screen, he had opened his messaging menu and navigated to the text Ziva had sent that morning. "Yeah." He nodded and showed the screen to Gibbs. "Seven-oh-two is just about a minute before Ziva sent her SOS to us." He looked up as the reality hit him. "The text was about her. It had to be."

Gibbs nodded and looked down at the bag he was still holding. "What's this one?"

"Oh." McGee pocketed his own phone and reached for the bag. "This," he said, gathering the bag so Gibbs could see the face of the phone, "is the phone that sent that text."

"How do you know?"

He nodded and held up the bagged phone. "Watch this." He hit "send" again on the unbagged phone and waited.

On cue, music blared out of the plastic bag.

"It's the phone that sent the text," McGee repeated. "I just told the phone to call the number that sent it the text. And that's _this _phone. I found it down there." He pointed to the pile of trash. "Whoever was using it dumped it. Maybe the second robber?"

"John Doe Number Two never had the chance to get back outside that door. He could have dropped it on the way in, though," Gibbs said.

"But that's not likely," McGee said, trying to think through the sequence of events. "Why would he purposely dump a piece of evidence right at the scene before going in to commit a crime?"

"Only one other option," Gibbs said with a shrug. "Someone else used that phone and gave the robbers a heads-up."

McGee nodded. "Which means they weren't working alone. And if they waited until they knew Ziva was inside, they weren't just here to rob the cash register. Boss, that means -"

"I know," Gibbs said, looking around the scene with new eyes. "It means she was the target."


	8. Blood transfusion

It took ten minutes and three rounds of explanations of HIPPA laws to convince a groggy, defensive Ziva to sign the forms that would allow Tony to receive updates on her condition, but she finally did it. Hiding a sigh of relief, Tony pushed back through the curtain after delivering the paperwork to the nurses' station and lowered himself into the hard plastic chair beside Ziva's hospital bed. He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. The adrenaline rush that had kicked in when he and Gibbs had run for the elevators that morning was finally dissipating, and all he wanted to do now was crawl up on that bed beside Ziva and take a nap. A huge yawn engulfed him, and he rubbed his eyes harder, trying to will himself to wake up.

"Hey now, don't you go out on us too," said a female voice from beside him.

Tony looked up to find a petite blonde woman he didn't recognize standing a foot away. Judging by her lab coat, she was one of the many doctors whom he and Ziva had encountered since they entered the hospital. Annoyed at himself for almost dozing off and at the doctor for calling him on it, Tony started to offer an explanation, but the woman waved it away with a tolerant smile. "You need to keep our patient awake, and you can't very well do that while you're snoring," she told him teasingly, patting his shoulder. "No napping, ok?"

"Yeah." He cleared his throat and nodded. "Sure. And you are...?"

"The newest round of poking and prodding for our friend here. I'm Doctor Black, the neurologist," the doctor said, talking to him without looking as she concentrated on sizing up Ziva, who was ignoring both her and the plastic bag of blood that was draining into her arm.

If Tony hadn't been so worried, he would have had a good laugh when the nurse had come to set the transfusion up. It turned out that tough-as-nails Ziva detested needles; she had tried to scramble out of the bed when the nurse had moved to place the line in her arm. Between Tony and the impressively-patient nurse, they had calmed her down, but she hadn't looked away from the ceiling since except to sign the disclosure forms he'd stuck in front of her face. He suspected she was doing her best to pretend the needle wasn't there.

"How are you doing, Miss David?" the doctor asked, leaning over the bed so Ziva could see her face.

Ziva grunted, not bothering to move her eyes away from the ceiling.

"I'm afraid I'll need more than that." Dr. Black squatted down, putting herself closer to Ziva's level, and touched her arm just below where the needle penetrated it. "You're almost done with that unit of blood. Does that make you any more inclined to talk?"

"No."

"Ziva," Tony began in annoyance. He wasn't surprised that she was being uncooperative, but that didn't mean he had the patience to deal with it right now.

"Oh, very well," Ziva sighed, sensing that he was approaching the end of his rope. She blinked slowly to focus her eyes, then turned her head to meet the doctor's gaze. "I am fine. I am in pain and I feel weak, but I am fine. There, good?"

Tony gave her an approving _mm-hmm_; Dr. Black smiled and nodded. "Very good. Ziva, do you mind if I take a look at you?"

"You are looking now," she pointed out coolly. "I can hardly stop you."

"A _closer _look. And I'd prefer to have your permission." The doctor looked over her shoulder at Tony and raised her eyebrows. "Is this normal for her?"

"What, being grumpy?" He leaned back in his chair and grinned. "Yeah, that's normal."

Not looking entirely convinced, the doctor half-smiled at him but returned her attention to Ziva. "Do you know what day it is, Ziva?"

"Yes."

"Ok, maybe not _this _grumpy." Tony sat up straight and, in his best Senior Field Agent voice, ordered, "Answer the question, David."

Ziva scowled. "It is Thursday."

"Very good." Dr. Black pulled a penlight out of the pocket of her lab coat. "I'm going to take a look at your eyes now. Just look straight ahead for me." She shined the light into first one of Ziva's eyes, then the other, and then replaced it in her pocket. "Well, you look ok," she mused, taking a step back from the bed. "Your pupils are reacting to the light, if a little bit slowly. Do you know what happened to you? Why you're here?"

Of course she did. Ziva opened her mouth to tell the woman so, then closed it again when she realized that no, she actually didn't. "The doctor said I was shot," she finally ventured without much confidence.

"Do you remember it happening?"

"No. I remember..." She paused. "I remember writing a note and sticking it on top of my keys, to remind myself in the morning when I picked them up. It said..." She sucked in her breath as an unexpected spear of pain shot through her head. "It said," she continued shakily after the spear faded away, leaving behind only a general, heavy pounding, " 'coffee'. And then I went to sleep. And then..." She bit her lip and shook her head, then winced at the new pain that caused. "Nothing. There is nothing."

Black smiled reassuringly. "That's pretty normal when someone takes a knock to the head. This morning may or may not come back. It's nothing to worry about." She patted Ziva's hand. "Once you're done with this unit of blood, we're going to take you up to CT and make sure the inside of your head's clean. Then we'll find you a room and you can relax. Sound good?"

"_Kus ima shelcha!"_

Confused by that response, the doctor looked over her shoulder at Tony.

That was one of the few Hebrew expressions Tony had picked up from Ziva in the course of their work; she had once blurted it out at a suspect who had tried to grope her. Tony had later asked her what she had said and been a bit shocked at the answer, considering Ziva's normal restraint.

"She said it sounds good," he offered to the doctor now, plastering a smile across his face and deliberately mistranslating the Hebrew equivalent of "Go fuck your mother".

Apparently, Ziva didn't like doctors prodding at her any more than she liked grabby suspects.

Looking from him to Ziva, the doctor nodded slowly and straightened up. "Can I talk to you outside?" she asked Tony, tipping her head toward the curtain that separated them from the rest of the Emergency Room.

He obediently followed her out, mind racing with the various possibilities of what she could want to tell him outside of Ziva's presence. Was she dying? Had they missed something terrible in their initial examination and now needed to tell him about it?

His worry quickly overtook his sense of the-doctor-speaks-first hospital propriety, and he blurted, "Is she really ok?" as soon as she pulled the curtain closed behind them.

The doctor sighed and crossed her arms. "Probably. But we won't know for sure until we see that CT scan."

That told him nothing. Tony felt like all he'd been hearing for hours now were different variations on _nothing _and _we don't know_. "What, exactly, are you afraid you'll find?" he pressed, tired of it.

"Bleeding inside her head - what we call hematoma. It's essentially bruising, but it's a lot more serious when it's inside the skull than when it's anywhere else. Your skull can't expand to make room for swelling like your skin can." At his look of alarm, she raised a calming hand. "It's a small chance after this type of injury, but not a negligible one. That's why I want to clear her as quickly as possible."

"So take her now!"

Black shook her head. "There's a ladder of priorities here. She needs that whole blood transfusion right now more than she needs the CT scan. Once we get the blood into her, CT moves to the top of the list. And once _that's _done, we'll evaluate whether she needs any more units of blood. In the meantime..." She looked over her shoulder through a crack in the curtain at Ziva, who had returned to her study of the hospital's ceiling. "We need to keep her awake. Keep her talking."

"Why?" Tony asked as a nurse brushed past him to pull back the curtain and enter Ziva's cubicle. "I thought that was just in movies, that you can't let someone who got hit in the head go to sleep."

"It's not that being awake confers any special protection," the doctor explained, keeping her eyes on the nurse as she leaned over Ziva. "It's that while we're operating blind to what's inside her skull, we need to get as clear a picture of her neurological state as we can based on what's going on on the outside. 'Unconscious' doesn't help with that. At least while she's awake, we can monitor her for any signs of brain swelling or internal bleeding - things like disorientation, a 10-on-a-scale-of-10 headache, numbness in her extremities. You know her better than we do, so we need your input on this while we're waiting. Anything that doesn't seem right, anything that's not _her - _let me or a nurse know."

Tony swallowed, intimidated by the charge, but finally managed to draw in an almost-confident breath and nod. "Sure."

"Good." She patted his arm. "Now, you obviously don't like being separated from her, so I won't keep you. Go on back inside. Keep your eyes open. We should be ready for the CT inside an hour. If anything doesn't seem right, grab me or a nurse _right away_." She stressed the last words.

Tony returned to the cubicle, quickly taking up a watch from the chair beside Ziva's bed. The nurse standing on the other side of Ziva's bed, monitoring the blood transfusion, smiled reassuringly at him but didn't attempt any conversation, for which he was grateful; he didn't think he could multitask at this point. After a few minutes, the nurse gave the bag of blood hanging beside Ziva a final shake, patted her arm, and left the room.

Ziva's eyes fluttered open as she looked for the source of the touch; when she didn't find anyone on that side of the bed, she slowly turned her head on the pillow and focused on him. "Hi," she said in a voice roughened from a dry throat.

"Hey," he replied, leaning forward. "How do you feel?"

"Hurts," she rasped, then licked her lips. "It is as if someone is stabbing me in the head. And I am terribly thirsty."

Tony smiled and gently pushed a lock of tangled hair out of her face. Her entire head was a mess; what hair wasn't matted with blood or tangled in her face had been clipped off to allow access to the bullet wound. He didn't look forward to having to explain to her that she would have a bald patch for a few months. "Yeah, well," he teased, deliberately keeping his voice light, "taking a bullet to the skull will do that to you. Next time, stop the bullet with some other body part and try not to bleed so much."

"I will keep that in mind. Tony?" she asked, turning her head on the pillow to try to track him as he and his hand disappeared from her field of vision.

"Still here," he said, leaning forward again so she could see him. "Just trying to get comfortable in this crappy chair."

"Am I the only one who was injured in this...event?" She paused, realizing that no one had told her quite what the 'event' was. "Tell me what happened."

"You were in that corner store, the one by your apartment." He looked up at the bag of blood, which was now almost empty. "Two guys tried to rob the place. You got caught in the middle." Smiling, he looked back down at her. "Or more likely, knowing you, you put yourself in the middle."

"The robbers?"

"Dead."

"Good," she replied fiercely. "Was anyone else in the store? _What about_ _Carlita_?" she added, half-sitting up in alarm as pieces came together in her brain. If the store had been open, then Carlita, and possibly others, had to have been present.

"Carlita is fine." He pressed her back to the bed with a hand on her shoulder. "Everyone's fine except for you."

"Good," she said again, returning her eyes to the ceiling and putting up no resistance to the force of his hand. "This day...such a _balagan."_

Tony raised his eyebrows. "A what?"

"What?" Ziva asked blankly, blinking at him.

"What's a _balagan_?"

"It is a..." She searched for the right English word. "A disaster. A mess. Why?"

Tony half-laughed, waiting for the punchline that had to be coming. "Because you just said it," he reminded her. "And I don't speak Hebrew, despite your best efforts to teach me all the dirty words."

Looking unconvinced, Ziva inclined her head in a slight nod. "Oh." Then, as if something terrible had occurred to her, her eyes widened. "What about Carlita?" she demanded, sitting up again.

"You just asked me that, and I told you she was fine. Look," he began, standing up, "I'm going to go get the doctor. She said I should let her know if anything seemed wrong, and -"

Before he could take more than a step away from the bed, Ziva had grabbed his hand. "_Al tezayen li et hasechel!"_ she snarled, squeezing until the bones in his fingers grated together.

"Ouch! Ziva!" Forgetting what he had been about to do, he tried to take his hand back. "Ok, fine," he finally relented, sitting back down with his hand still attached to hers, "but if you're going to call me mean names, which I'm sure is what that just was, you're going to have to do it in a language I understand. Otherwise it just doesn't have the same impact, you know?"

The fury suddenly drained out of Ziva's face, leaving behind only confusion. "Tony?" she asked tremulously, looking down at where she was still clutching his hand. "Where is Carlita?"

Something was definitely wrong. "That's it. I'm getting the doctor." He tried to pull his hand away again as he stood up, but her grip tightened even more. "Ziva," he began, looking back at her, "you can't just - _Ziva!" _

Ziva wasn't paying attention. Eyes rolled back in her head, teeth clenched, Ziva was arching off the bed like a bow.

* * *

A/N: Have slightly updated the Hebrew with some corrections from a reader who actually speaks it (thanks Mastool). This is what I get for researching curses in languages I don't speak on the internet...


	9. Tony & Ducky

Ducky packed up his field case as he watched Jimmy Palmer begin to wheel away the two corpses piled onto one gurney. Two identifications and then two autopsies would keep him, Palmer, and Abby busy for the rest of the day at least, but he intended to make a very important stop before going back to NCIS to deal with those. "Mr. Palmer," he said as the other man narrowly missed clipping a police officer with the corner of the gurney, "have a care, please. Those are valuable relics!"

"Sorry!" Palmer pulled the gurney to a halt and looked over his shoulder apologetically. "Sorry, Doctor, I kinda lost control going over that curb, and -"

"No matter. Just take better care driving back, please."

"I..." Palmer blinked. "I'm driving?"

Ducky smiled regretfully and used his case to lever himself to his feet. "You'll have to, unless you plan to push them back on foot. I will not be riding with you."

Palmer waited until Ducky caught up with him, then started walking again. "Well, how are you going to get back?"

"By way," Ducky said, using one hand to clap his hat onto his head, "of Bethesda."

Understanding now, Palmer nodded and opened the back of their truck. "Tell Ziva we're all pulling for her."

"I shall," Ducky replied, lifting the gurney's legs with the ease of long practice as Palmer locked its support bar onto a hook on the truck's floor. "Assuming I can get in to see her. However," he added as Palmer's face fell, "if I cannot see her, I will be sure to pass the message on to Agent DiNozzo, who, I'm sure, will be happy to pass it to her at his first opportunity."

Palmer managed a weak smile at that. They both knew that a bullet wound to Ziva's head meant there very well might never be an opportunity. But he put that out of his mind and determined to think only positive thoughts. "As long as she gets the message. When can I expect you back to start the examinations, Doctor?" he asked, slamming one of the rig's doors, then the other, and accepting the case the doctor held out to him.

Shaking his head, Ducky followed him around toward the driver's seat. "I shouldn't think it would be too long. She won't be up to long visits. Have things ready in an hour or two, let's say."

"Yes, sir." Palmer climbed up into the truck's cab and started the engine. "Will do!" he called out the window as he began to maneuver the truck through the crowd toward the break in the police barriers.

Ducky watched the truck go, then heaved a sigh and turned back toward where Gibbs and McGee stood in conversation. "Gentlemen," he called as he approached, "I'm off to visit our fallen heroine. Are there any messages you'd like me to pass along?"

The two men exchanged glances. "Tell her we'll be by to see her as soon as we can," McGee offered.

"If she's up to it, see if she remembers anything about the robbery," Gibbs, ever the pragmatist, added. "And," he went on more gently, "tell her we'll be by to see her as soon as we can."

"Duly noted." Ducky doffed his hat to them. "What do you plan to do next?"

Gibbs looked pointedly at the uncomfortable-looking senator's aide standing a few yards away. "We're taking our shooter back to NCIS," he said.

"He'll be spending some quality time with us and Abby until we get this straightened out," added McGee. He shook his head. "Still can't believe the robbers got the drop on Ziva but _this _guy took out two of them."

"Maybe he didn't," Gibbs pointed out.

"Well, I'll leave you three to your work, then," Ducky said. "Now, where's the best place to catch a taxi in this area?" he mused, looking around. "You'd think they'd be eager to pick up all the gawkers at scenes like this."

"Duck -" Gibbs tossed him a set of keys. "Take mine. McGee and I can go back in one car."

Ducky barely managed to catch the bundle. "Much appreciated," he said, and saluted the pair. "Enjoy your drive."

"Um, Boss," he heard McGee speak up as they turned away, "maybe you should let me drive this t-"

Gibbs just held out his hand for the keys McGee was holding.

* * *

Ducky walked into the ER waiting room at Bethesda unsure of the best tack to take. Depending on the mood of the receptionist handling the room, he might be allowed immediately into the ER or he might be ordered to sit and wait. He was willing to pull rank, or possibly phone the director of the hospital, whom he knew socially, if he had to, but he decided to first try a polite approach at the desk. "Hello," he said to the receptionist, who looked up from her computer screen and blinked, "I wonder if you could assist me. I believe you have an NCIS agent inside. Ziva David. She sustained a head wound. Might I be able to see her?"

The woman blinked again, her eyes magnified behind the lenses of her glasses. "Family?" she asked, looking at him consideringly.

"Something like that, yes."

She looked back down at her monitor, clicked the mouse a few times, and nodded before looking back up at him. "She just got sent up to OR. You can sign in and go up to their waiting room, if you want." She offered him a binder filled with sign-in sheets and a pen. "It's up two flights, and -"

"Yes, thank you, I have been there before." He added his information to the list and accepted the laminated plastic "VISITOR" badge she handed him. "Agent David had a friend with her when she came in. Would he have been directed to the operating room waiting area also?"

"Oh, the nice, worried guy." The woman smiled, then shook her head, remembering him. "He was a mess - had her blood all over him. I think one of the doctors offered to set him up with some scrubs. They were trying to keep him clear of her while - well," she interrupted herself, realizing she was sharing too many details, "they would have sent him up to OR after that."

Ducky managed a nod of thanks at that. 'All over him' could be an exaggeration, he reminded himself as he turned away from her and headed for the elevators. But the fact that Ziva was being sent to an operating room short-circuited most of the benign outcomes he'd come up with on his way from the scene. An operation meant there was some involvement inside her skull, and that wasn't good news. Absently pressing his hat to his chest, he allowed the elevator to do the work of getting him upstairs while he stayed lost in thought, running through the possibilities. The worst, of course, was that the bullet had penetrated her skull and destroyed vital brain tissue or her brain stem; the good news, considering what he knew, was that if that had happened, she would probably never had made it to the OR. The bullet could also have hit peripheral brain tissue, something that was not immediately necessary to her survival; if that was the case, neurosurgery was a good possibility, as the doctors might need to remove the bullet or make room for swelling. A third, even better possibility, was that she simply had a skull fracture and the surgeons were piecing her back together in the operating room. There was even an outside possibility that what the witnesses claimed to have seen had been mistaken, and the bullet hadn't even hit her head. She could just be having a broken arm fixed in the operating room, for all he knew.

He decided that for the remaining time before he found out for sure, he would choose to believe the last possibility. Concentrating so hard on his positive thinking, he didn't even see Tony pacing outside the surgical waiting room until the younger man stopped him with a hand on his arm.

"Ducky?" Tony asked, letting go of the doctor's arm when he looked up in surprise.

"I'm sorry, Tony, I was lost in thought. The front desk told me that Ziva is being prepped for surgery. Tell me what's happened," he urged. "How is she? How are _you_?"

Tony shook his head and wiped a sweaty hand on his borrowed scrubs. They bagged on him, obviously made in a one-size-fits-all mold that would fit a doctor fifty pounds heavier. "Not good. We thought she was fine, but then she started saying weird things and then she had a . . . a seizure. They kicked me out then." He swallowed. "They said they need to drill a hole in her head to relieve the pressure."

"Come on." Noticing how lost Tony looked, Ducky decided to take charge. He put a hand on the younger man's back, urging him back into the waiting room. "Let's sit down, and you can tell me everything from the beginning. Tell me what the doctors said about the gunshot wound. How bad was it?"

Tony moved with distracted obedience, and the two men settled onto a padded bench against one wall inside the room. "They said it wasn't bad," he said, looking around the room in the hopes that a doctor would appear. "When he was examining her, the doctor was surprised that there was 'no penetration'."

Ducky leaned forward, his attention caught. "The bullet didn't penetrate her skull?" he asked. When Tony, eyes fixed on the door that led to the operating suite, didn't answer, Ducky snapped his fingers in front of his face. "Anthony!"

"What? Sorry." Tony looked back at him, blinking. "How long do you think it will take?"

"I can see you're worried, and you're not the only one, but I can't tell you how long it will take until I know what's been happening. Tell me the rest of it, please."

With obvious effort, Tony picked up the tale again. "The doctor said Ziva must have been a ninja, because the bullet just tore a strip off her scalp but didn't go any deeper. But then they said it's like being hit hard in the head. The neurologist said she could have bleeding in the brain, and they wanted a scan, but they wanted to give her a blood transfusion first. I was talking to her and she was ok, but then she started cursing and repeating herself and she, um . . ." He drew in a deep breath and shook his head. "She had a seizure. The needle came out of her arm, and she started bleeding again . . . the neurologist said it was what she had been afraid of. They said they had to drain the blood out of her skull."

"A hematoma," Ducky summarized, nodding as things became more clear. "Probably epidural, considering the lateral force of a bullet. Yes, that's a not-unlikely result of a gunshot wound. But she was awake, you said?"

"Um." Tony froze as the door opened, then slumped back in his seat as he saw that it was just an orderly pushing a cart. "What?" he asked, forcing his attention back to Ducky as he belatedly realized he'd been asked something.

"Was she _awake_, Anthony," Ducky repeated impatiently. It was an important point; chances of survival with an epidural hematoma increased when there was a lucid interval before the patient succumbed to the pressure on their brain.

"Oh. Yeah. She was talking, to me and the nurses and the doctor." He half-smiled. "She even made fun of me a little. But then she just kind of . . . lost it."

"That's good." He patted the younger man on the hand in a fatherly gesture. "Her chances are good, Tony. She has a top medical team working on her, and there's been no delay. It's so often the delay that kills, with epidural hematoma," he went on thoughtfully. "Like that actress who died last year, after hitting her head while skiing. If she had just gone to the hospital immediately -"

"Natasha Richardson?" Tony's head whipped around, and for the first time since Ducky had found him, he focused totally on the doctor. "Ziva has the same thing she died of?"

"Well, yes," Ducky admitted, regretting the comparison immediately, "but as I said, there's been no _delay _for Ziva as there was for her. It's a different situation."

Wordlessly, Tony dropped his face into his hands and groaned.

Ducky watched him, realizing just how close to the edge Tony was. "I'm going to go call Mr. Palmer and tell him to put the bodies on hold," he said briskly, standing up, "and then I will wait here with you until we know."

Tony looked up. "Ducky, you don't have to -"

"No arguments, Anthony." He rested a hand on Tony's shoulder for a second and offered him a reassuring smile. "You don't have to sit through this alone."

Tony closed his eyes, heaved a sigh, and leaned back against the wall. "Thanks."

* * *

**A/N: I might be without internet for the next week or so (Moving sucks. Moving sucks even worse during an insane snowstorm that delays all cable installations), and if that happens, there will be no way for me to update any of my stories (including the regular Tuesday night chaps of _Tales from the Men's Room_). Keep an eye on my twitter feed, FluffyFanFic, which I can update from work, to see what the situation is.**


	10. Danny

Half an hour later, Ducky, who had been slumped back against the waiting room wall in a near-perfect mirroring of Tony's posture, rolled his head to the side to look at the other man. "I forgot to ask you," he said, breaking the thick silence that had filled the room and startling his companion out of his thoughts. "When you called Jethro, did he give you any indication of how soon they would be finished and able to stop by? I'm sure they're both eager to - what?" he broke off as Tony's face transformed into a look of horror. "Was it something I said?" Worried, he followed as Tony jumped to hit feet. "Anthony!"

Tony stopped halfway across the room and turned back to him. "I forgot to call him." He laughed hoarsely. "There's been no time - one thing after another -" The ugly laughter continued, a sound that set Ducky's teeth on edge. "I didn't want to go too far away in case she . . ."

"That's all right." Ducky patted him on the shoulder, heading off the end of Tony's sentence so he didn't have to say what Ducky knew he didn't want to say. "You've been rather distracted. Why don't you let me speak to him. Go on," he urged, waving Tony back to his seat, "sit back down. I can explain the situation better, anyway. And for god's sake," he added as Tony continued to laugh distractedly, "stop laughing."

Tony didn't seem to have been aware that he was, and he stopped mid-laugh, looking shocked at himself. "I . . ." he began apologetically, then realized he had no idea what to say to explain himself. He could only shake his head, wondering if he was finally losing it.

Deciding that they could both use some time to collect themselves, Ducky retrieved his phone from his pocket and left the room.

* * *

"Yeah. Yeah, I got it, Duck. Thanks for the call." Without waiting for a goodbye, Gibbs disconnected the call and dropped his cell phone back into his pocket. He knocked perfunctorily on the outside of the interrogation room door, then let himself in.

"Tell me again how you managed to get her gu- hey, Boss." McGee and the young Hill staffer, who had been absorbed in their mental trip back through the robbery, both looked up with surprise. "What's up?" McGee asked.

"That was Ducky. He's at Bethesda with Tony and Ziva."

"She's alive?" Danny Weiss blurted, eyes wide. "I mean," he explained when McGee and Gibbs directed matching stares at him, "that's great! She looked so bad there on the floor, you know . . ."

When Gibbs didn't immediately offer any response, McGee puffed out his cheeks as he released a deep breath. "Everything going ok there?" he asked, rather proud of how calm he managed to make the question sound.

Gibbs shook his head and pulled out a chair at the table. "She's in surgery," he said, dropping into the seat. "Bleeding in her brain."

"Oh, god." McGee dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his forehead. "Did he say how bad? What are her chances?"

"Later, McGee." Absently, Gibbs glanced at their witness and raised one finger to run it over his eye, where a faint scar from his own brush with a head wound was camouflaged by his eyebrow. "Ducky suggests we wrap this case up and get down there."

McGee swallowed. "Ducky said that?"

"Yeah. Which means we've got work to do." Gibbs made a mental change in gears and turned to Danny. "Tell us again. From the beginning."

The young man sighed and ran a hand through his hair, trying to put it into some semblance of order. It had once been scrupulously styled, but somewhere between running late, being robbed, and shooting two men, his style had lost cohesion. Now, he had one chunk plastered over his ear by what was left of the hair gel he'd put in this morning, and the rest sticking out from his head at various angles. "I went in for breakfast," he began, repeating the story he'd already told them twice. "I was running late, but if I don't grab something to eat before I get to Dirksen - that's the building my office is in," he explained when neither man's face showed recognition of the name, "- then I'm hungry until lunch, because the Senator keeps me running and I don't have a chance to grab anything. So I always stop into the Seventh Street Market, because they're only a block down from my apartment, on the way to the bus. I mean, assuming I don't miss the bus and have to run or catch a cab." He smiled sheepishly. "That's been known to happen. I graduated from college last spring, and I still haven't managed to get the hang of waking up early, so -"

"The store," Gibbs directed, heading off the young man's rambling. "What happened once you were inside?"

"Oh. Um." Danny winced at the obvious displeasure on Gibb's face. "I was running late, as usual. Mrs. Alfaro told me to just go ahead with my food and pay her later -" He stopped, confused, as he realized that he had never gotten a chance to eat his breakfast. "I don't know what happened to the food after that. I guess I must have dropped it somewhere in the store. Uh," he went on, catching his digression before Gibbs could. "I paid her anyway. She said I could catch the bus if I ran, so I was just taking my change back from her when the door opened and these two guys came in."

"Can you describe them?" McGee interrupted.

Danny blinked at him. "Big. Ugly. The guys who are in your morgue now."

"You're sure of that?"

Danny opened his palms on the table, as if to say _What more do you want from me? "_I shot them. I would think I'd recognize them," he said impatiently.

Gibb's eyes flicked from McGee to Weiss, and he nodded to the young man. "Go on."

"They came in," Danny picked up, directing his attention at the man who asked useful questions instead of the one who asked silly ones. "And they showed us that they had guns in their waistbands." He closed his eyes. "Mrs. Alfaro screamed. One of them jumped over the counter and went after her. He told her to empty the cash register. The other guy stood by the door, making sure no one came in."

"And you . . . what?" Gibbs prompted. "What did you do while this guy was waving a gun in the poor lady's face?"

Looking taken aback at the sudden attack, Danny colored slightly. "I, um . . ." he ventured. "I kind of tripped, and fell over a rack of potato chips. And then I tried to get to the back of the store. To see if anyone else was trapped," he added defiantly before either man could say a word. "Not to hide."

Gibbs shrugged and twirled a finger, indicating he should go on.

"I got back to the coffee prep area, and I saw -" He paused, furrowing his brows. "I don't know think I know her name, actually. Mrs. Alfaro only ever calls her 'Chiquita,' so that's what I think of her as when I see her in there, but I don't think that's - "

"Her name's Ziva," McGee supplied. "Ziva David."

"Ziva," Danny repeated, testing the name out. "Well, I saw Ziva, and then there was a younger girl lying on the floor. I sat down next to Ziva, and then we heard someone else walking around. She reached out and pushed the other girl out of the way. One of the guys came around the corner and saw us, and he called back to his friend, and then he told me to move away from Ziva, so I did that. Um," he added, seeming to feel self-conscious about having admitted to leaving Ziva alone, "I thought they were just going to tie us up or something."

"With their guns?" Gibbs asked with raised eyebrows.

Danny just shrugged.

"Then what?"

"She pulled out a gun really fast - I don't even know where she was hiding it - and she shot the guy in the shoulder. She started yelling at him, and he fell down."

"What did _you_ do?" McGee asked.

Danny blinked. "It all happened really fast. I didn't have time to do anything before - I mean, she was handling it, and I don't think she even cared that I was there. And then I was moving to get up, and suddenly the other guy was there behind her." He swallowed. "He shot her in the head. She dropped, almost right in front of me. I saw her gun, and I -"

"Wait." McGee held up a hand. He pushed a pad of paper across the table toward the other man, then dropped a pencil down next to it. "Can you sketch this? Where you were, where she fell, where the shooter was?"

Danny looked down at the paper, then back up at McGee, before nodding. "Sure. Ok." He lifted the pencil and cautiously started drawing. "I was here - the corner between the coffee bar and the wall," he narrated. "Ziva was about five feet away. The guy she shot was on the ground between her and me." He lifted the pencil off the paper and paused, squinting at his sketch so far. "The other robber, he came up this aisle here." He pointed. "And she was looking down at the one she had shot, so she didn't see him."

"Where was the first guy's gun?" Gibbs broke in, leaning forward to squint at the sketch.

Danny opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. "I," he finally admitted slowly, "um, don't actually know. I didn't see it."

"He didn't drop it when she shot him or anything?" McGee pressed.

He shook his head. "He might have. I was kind of, uh, well I mean my mind was kind of blown at that point. It could have been right there and I wouldn't have noticed."

"Ok." Gibbs tapped the drawing paper. "Bang. Robber Number Two fires at Ziva. One shot?"

Danny nodded.

"And she fell?"

Danny nodded again.

"Show us."

Biting his lip, he sketched in a rough line showing the direction the stick-figure Ziva he'd drawn had fallen. "Toward me. Her knees went out from under her, and she kind of crumpled." He drew a dotted-line Ziva perpendicular to the original one. "Her head was toward me. Maybe two feet away."

"And her gun?"

He looked down at the sketch, thinking. "She lost her grip on it about halfway down. It was going to hit the ground maybe here." He drew an X. "I automatically tried to grab it, and I got it just before it went under the counter."

"Why did you try to catch it?"

Danny stared at him as if the answer was too obvious to bother voicing. "I couldn't let it just slam into the floor! It might have gone off!"

"It can go off when someone _catches _it, too," Gibbs pointed out. "But you got lucky. You caught it, and it didn't. Then what?"

"I . . ." He wetted his lips thoughtfully. "I guess I was kind of going on instinct. I caught it, and I turned around and I shot the guy who shot her."

"Where?"

"In the . . ." He broke off, shaking his head. "You know, I don't know. I didn't really aim. It didn't occur to me. I just wanted to make him back off, and I figured shooting at him would . . ."

"Would do it?" McGee finished. "Well, it 'did it' in more ways than one. You got him in the middle of the forehead."

Danny's eyes widened. "Is that hard to do?"

"Only if you're not Ziva," Gibbs replied testily. "The second guy went down as soon as the bullet hit him?"

Danny nodded.

"So how'd he get a _second _hole in his head?" McGee asked.

Danny flushed. "He had a _gun_," he said insistently. "I didn't want him getting up when I turned my back on him and shooting me! I know maybe police wouldn't think that way, but I . . ." He shook his head. "I was scared, you know?"

"And his buddy?"

"Same."

"He only had a busted arm," Gibbs said. "He was probably conscious. He didn't try to stop you? He didn't even _move_?"

Danny shrugged. "I guess I moved too fast for him."

The two agents exchanged a look. "What happened next?" McGee asked.

"Mrs. Alfaro came running over - I don't know why," he interrupted himself, "because for all she knew the robbers had shot me and not the other way around - and she grabbed Ziva. She was bleeding. Ziva, I mean. Mrs. Alfaro was trying to stop it, and then the other girl came over and tried to help, and then -" He looked at Gibbs. "You broke the door open and yelled for me to put down the gun. So I did," he finished simply.

"So the robbers shot an armed federal agent," Gibbs summarized skeptically, "and you grabbed her gun before it even hit the ground, and you administered three kill shots. Without aiming." He leaned forward. "Do you have any firearms training, Mr. Weiss?"

Danny's eyes widened. "I've gone hunting a few times, back home. Um. The Senator took me to a range once, right after I was hired. He lent me a revolver." He paused, unsure. "I think it was a revolver. The other one is 'semiautomatic,' right?"

"Revolvers have little spinny things between the trigger and the barrel," Gibbs explained as if to a child, circling one finger in imitation of a spinning cylinder. "You put the bullets into the spinny thing. Did you put the bullets into a spinny thing when the Senator took you shooting, Danny?"

The ingenuous look on Danny's face morphed into a scowl. "Hey, look, I'm trying to help you out here, and I resent you making fun of me. I shot those guys in self-defense. And I saved your friend's life, too. And all I get is you making jokes about how much of an idiot I must be because I don't know guns?" He shook his head, planted his hands on the table, and pushed back his chair. "Am I under arrest? Because if not, I've had the day from _hell_, and I'd like to go home and try to forget about it."

"Sit down," Gibbs ordered quietly.

"No. If you're going to keep me here, I want a lawyer, and -"

"_Sit down_!"

Speechless at Gibbs's sudden bellow, Danny obeyed. "I have a right to legal representation, Agent Gibbs. I work for a United States Senator. I know the law. I probably know the law better than you do, and -"

Gibbs ignored him. "You are not under arrest at the moment, Mr. Weiss," he said, leaning back in his chair, "and you are free to go home as long as you don't leave the District while this investigation continues. However," he added when Danny started to speak, "before you are allowed to leave this building, you will be taken down to Forensics. You will give your clothes to Abigail Sciuto there. You will be given a pair of sweats to wear home. You will provide Miss Sciuto with any other samples she requires." He leaned forward again, pinning Danny with a glare. "You will be _polite_ to Miss Sciuto while you allow her to do her work."

"I -"

"Understood?"

Looking rebellious, Danny nevertheless nodded.

"Good. McGee." Gibbs inclined his head, and McGee stood up and crossed to the interview room door.

"This way, Mr. Weiss." McGee opened the door and held it until Danny was over the threshold. "Stay," he ordered, indicating the wall just outside the room, then poked his head back inside. "Boss?" he prompted, waiting for direction.

Gibbs nodded. "When you're done with him, report to Bethesda. Spell Tony."

"You sure, Boss? If there's more we need to -"

Gibbs stood up and walked over to the door. "I'll be there to relieve Ducky later."

McGee nodded and turned to go. "Right."

"McGee."

He turned back around. "Yeah, Boss?"

"I want two of us with her as much as possible. She does not get left alone for so much as a _second_ until we've got this figured out. Got it?"

Understanding now, McGee nodded with more confidence. "Got it, Boss. See you later."

"And McGee -"

Sighing, McGee turned on his heel again to face Gibbs. "Yeah."

Gibbs's face softened. "Tell her we're keeping her chair warm."

McGee smiled faintly and pulled the door closed as he stepped fully into the hallway. "Let's go," he told Danny, and started toward Abby's lab.


	11. United in suspense

Gibbs strode into the hospital two hours later, trailed by an excitedly-gesturing Abby. She had insisted that he couldn't leave NCIS without her and that her lab machinery could run the tests that needed to be done in her absence, and finally he had thrown up his hands and let her climb into the passenger seat of his car. He didn't think she'd stopped talking since, despite his only replies being distracted nods.

". . . so I mean, I just want you to understand that, Gibbs," Abby went on, scrambling to catch up with him as he headed for the surgical waiting room the receptionist had told him he'd find Ziva's other visitors in. "I don't want you to think I was mad at you, because I wasn't. Well, I mean, I kind of was, but that was just . . . a thing. Like, you said you were leaving, so what else was I going to think, right?" She didn't wait for him to answer, just double-timed two steps to his next one to close some of the distance between them. "But I know - I _know_ - you wouldn't just leave Ziva here without a good reason, and I know that you and McGee are better than Metro anyway, so I mean of _course_ you'd want to take over the scene, but still, I don't understand why you couldn't have waited to make us all go to work until after we know if Ziva's going to be ok, and -"

"Abby." He stopped outside the waiting room and turned to face her. Startled, Abby had to pull up short to keep from walking into him. "If you don't take a breath soon, you're gonna put yourself in one of those hospital beds next to Ziva."

Surprised, Abby shut her mouth. She gave him a thoughtful look, then nodded. "Ok. But I mean, you understand, right?"

"I understand, Abs. Now, you ready?"

She took a deep breath and let it out. "Yeah." She took his arm nervously, and together they walked into the room.

Noticing their entrance out of the corner of his eye, Ducky raised his chin off his chest and looked up. "Well, hello," he began, standing up and wincing as his back muscles protested the need to unfold himself from the bench. "I'm glad you've finally made it. _Isn't that right, Timothy_?" he asked, raising his voice on the question.

McGee, who had been slumped against the wall with his eyes closed, started violently and opened his eyes, then sat up straight when he caught sight of the newcomers. "Uh, hi, Boss, Abby. I was just, uh, resting my -"

Gibbs ignored his explanation and turned back to Ducky. "What's her status?"

Ducky smiled like a proud father. "She made it through surgery with no apparent complications. They've taken her to recovery while the anesth-"

"Who's with her?" Gibbs interrupted suddenly, looking from Ducky to McGee. "If you're both out here, _who's guarding Ziva_?"

"Um, Tony is, Boss," McGee replied, running a nervous hand over his hair and trying to blink the sleep from his eyes. "They would only let one person into the recovery room with her."

"I told you to _spell_ Tony, McGee, not just join the crowd. Why the hell didn't you send him out of here?"

"I tried, Boss, believe me." He looked to Ducky, who nodded a verification of his statement. "He wouldn't go. Said he'd taken her this far, and he was damn well going to stay with her 'til we know. He was kind of strung out."

" 'Kind of'?" Ducky asked with a snort. "No need to qualify that statement, Timothy."

"Ok," McGee agreed, "he was strung out. Period."

Gibbs sighed and shook his head. "He still wearing those bloody clothes?"

McGee blinked. "What?"

"C'mere. _Come here,_" Gibbs added more forcefully, waving an arm at him when McGee didn't stand up quickly enough for his taste. "This," he said, taking a keyring from his pocket and working a small key off of it, "is the key to Tony's locker. Go back to headquarters, grab whatever change of clothes he has in there, bring it back here. He was a mess when he got into the ambulance with her. He's gonna want to clean up once she's stable, and I forgot to bring something for him to change into."

McGee automatically took what Gibbs held out, then looked down at it and tried to hand it back to him. "Oh, no, he's good. They made him change into scrubs while, uh . . ." He looked at Ducky, who could provide a better explanation.

"Ziva had a bit of an . . . episode," Ducky picked up, "while in the Emergency Room. She had a seizure, from Tony's description. I believe he took it rather hard; the staff seems to have distracted him by telling him he needed to change out of his bloody clothes. They put him into a set of scrubs."

"Ah." Gibbs nodded and pocketed the locker key McGee gave back to him. "Good. Ziva's going to need clothes too, but we can worry about that later. When can we talk to her?" he asked, turning back to Ducky.

The doctor shook his head. "It depends on how quickly the anesthetic wears off, and how stable the doctors evaluate her to be when she wakes up." He started to add something else, then thought better of it and shook his head.

"What?" Gibbs prompted. "Spit it out, Duck."

He sighed. "It will also depend," he allowed reluctantly, "on her neurological state when she wakes up."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that at the moment, neither you nor I know how much damage was done to her brain by the bleeding and pressure." Ducky crossed his arms. "I'm afraid there's no way to know that until she wakes up."

* * *

**A/N: I'm having annoying real life issues (hard drive failure! work deadlines! such excitement!) and I don't have as much time to write lately, but I know I'm already way behind on updating this story, so here's a short-ish chapter to keep your appetites whetted.**


	12. Awakening

"Her vitals are returning to normal. She should be back with us soon."

The words meant nothing to Ziva, but their sound shook her out of unconsciousness. She was freezing, she realized, colder than she'd ever been in her life. She could feel her teeth chattering, and tears of pain came to her eyes. Oddly, even her tears weren't warm against her skin as they trickled down toward her ears.

Why were her tears running toward her ears instead of her chin? That meant she was lying down. Why was she lying down? She tried to sit up, but she couldn't quite seem to get her elbows under her, and anyway, there was a hand locked around her wrist. As she struggled, another set of hands suddenly touched her shoulders, pushing her back down. Ziva tried desperately to open her eyes. Where was she? Had she been taken captive again? An image of the things that had been done to her the last time she was captured rose to her mind, and through sheer will, she forced her eyes open.

She expected to see leering faces, guns, ropes, and a dirt floor. Instead, she saw a sterile white ceiling. There was none of the muted, angry conversation that had filled the terrorist camp in Somalia; instead there was a quiet murmuring above her. Blinded by a light shining directly down at her, she couldn't see any faces, but she sensed they were there. She blinked slowly, trying to clear the tears from her eyes, but the effort was hampered by the fact that she was shivering so violently that her vision took on the jerky quality of an old movie as she tried to close her eyelids.

"She's cold," said a suddenly-clear voice to her left, one that sounded oddly familiar. Immediately, she felt the weight against her breasts increase as another blanket was unfurled over her.

Her captors were concerned with whether she was warm or not? That was odd. She tried again to focus her sight, squinting against the blinding light. This time, she almost managed it, and a face swam into her line of sight. Some automatic part of her brain recognized it as one she should know, but then her eyes fluttered closed again and she couldn't seem to recall what the face looked like or who it belonged to. Another tear trickled down her cheek.

"Why is she crying?" the voice demanded, and her mind finally conjured up an image of a ruddy face smiling at her. She couldn't quite retrieve the information on who it was, but she knew that face went with the voice, and she knew that if that face was there, she had to be safe. "Is she in pain?" the voice went on, rising nervously.

"No, she couldn't be," said another voice. "The local anesthetic will be with her for a while yet." The new voice was shockingly close to her ear and sounded like a gong in her quiet, muffled world. Ziva jerked in surprise at the sudden volume. "I think she's hearing us now," the second voice said. "Ziva? You with us? Can you open your eyes?"

She tried her best, fighting another battle of wills with her eyelids. She finally managed to crack them open, but all she could see was the bright light again. "_Ba'hir_," she rasped, slamming her eyes closed again. _Bright_. She couldn't look at anyone until they stopped blinding her with that damn thing.

"What did she say?" the second voice, one she could now identify as female, asked.

"I think it was Hebrew," said the first, male, voice. "Unfortunately, I only know the dirty words, and that wasn't one of 'em." The voice moved closer, and she imagined its owner leaning over her. "Give us that again in English, Ziva?"

English? Hadn't she spoken in . . . well, she realized, she didn't quite know _what_ she had spoken in. And what was _English_? She sorted through jumbled thoughts and impressions, searching for what these people wanted of her, but everything seemed to be covered with cobwebs. Alarmed by her inability to access the information she needed, she quickly tried again with whatever she could grab that seemed associated with what she was trying to say. "_Satea'a_." Neither voice responded to that and she desperately tried again, terrified by the prospect of not being able to communicate: "_Yarkii! Hell!_"

"Did she say 'hell'?" asked the female voice.

"I think so." The male voice moved farther away again. "Save the cursing for later, David. Come on, open your eyes talk to us in English."

"_Bright_!" She knew she'd finally hit on it as it came out and she pried her eyes open again to see their reactions. Immediately, one face moved away and the light dimmed. The other face became clearer without the halo of light behind it, and she managed to focus her eyes on the man. She still couldn't put a name to his face, but her heart gave a leap as it came into focus.

"Hey there," its owner said with a smile. "Welcome back."

She frowned and groped through her brain for something that felt like a response. "Yes," was what she came up with, so she said that.

The man looked away from her, toward the owner of the other voice. "Is this normal?" he asked.

"She's still coming out of it," the woman said. "All the cylinders aren't quite firing yet."

"A car metaphor," the man said, smiling. "I like that."

Ziva felt a sudden sensation of wrongness at the sight of the man smiling at the woman. "No!" she croaked.

Both people looked down at her in surprise. "What?" asked the man, but Ziva couldn't coax any more words out of her mouth, which felt like it was filled with cotton.

"She probably has the dry mouth to end all dry mouths," the woman said, and reached behind her to pick up a cup. She brought the straw to Ziva's mouth. "Take a sip, slowly." She looked back at the man. "She'll sound clearer once she's had a drink." She pried the cup out of Ziva's greedy fingers after a second and put it down on the table she had gotten it from. "There, better?"

"_Ken_."

"That's Hebrew for 'yes'," the man said quickly. "And now we've pretty much exhausted all the Hebrew I know, so you'd better switch to English, Ziva. Or else start cursing the nurses out again."

Nurses? Ziva blinked slowly, trying to bring the woman into the same focus as the man. After a second, her eyes cooperated and she could make out a stethoscope around the woman's neck. "Nurse?" she repeated, out loud this time. The word felt like it had no meaning, as if she were just repeating back the syllables.

The woman nodded. "That's me. Do you know where you are, Ziva?"

Slowly, awkwardly, she rolled her from one side to the other in a negative motion. "Doctor?" she ventured.

"Close. You're at a hospital. You have a head injury. Do you remember being here?"

She shook her head.

"Do you remember what happened to you?"

She wetted her lips. "No. What?"

"Well," the woman backpedaled, "we'll get to that. Can you tell me your name?"

Ziva blinked at her. Did the nurse not realize that she already knew it, had been calling her it every few words? "Ziva."

"And who's this handsome guy over here?" The nurse waved a hand toward the man.

It was right there, on the tip of her tongue. She reached for his name, missed, then caught it. "Tony!" she exclaimed, more proud of herself than she could remember ever being before.

Tony's face split into a relieved smile. "That's me. How do you feel?"

She took a second to query her body, still unsure what parts, exactly, she should expect to pain her. "Fine."

The nurse leaned forward. "Wiggle your fingers for me, Ziva?" Ziva did. "Good. Now your toes?" She lifted the sheet to peek underneath at Ziva's feet, and nodded when they moved. "Good girl. I'm going to go grab your doctor. In the meantime -" She turned to smile at Tony. "She can have some more water if she wants it, but don't let her gulp down the whole thing."

Tony nodded. "When can she have visitors? There's a - I mean - she has friends waiting outside. A doctor."

"Once we get her out of recovery and booked into her own room, she can have whatever visitors she feels up to. But let's let her doctor check her out first." And giving him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, she left the room.

With a sigh, Tony sat down in a chair beside the bed and looked down at his hands. "You scared the living hell out of me, you know that?"

Ziva blinked slowly. The cobwebs in her mind were starting to clear, but only enough so that she could see what words she was reaching for; actually grabbing hold of them seemed to still be beyond her. "Scared?" she repeated, feeling like an echo.

Surprised at her failure to engage with her usual vigor, he looked back up at her. "Yeah, scared. As in, we thought you might die. It might surprise you to know that thinking things like that kind of _sucks_."

The vehemence in his words was foreign enough that she made another effort to lift her head off the pillows to look at him. _I am surprised you admitted to being frightened, is all_, was what she meant to say, but again, the system failed somewhere between brain and mouth. What came out was, "Surprise . . . you, you . . . worrying."

He raised his eyebrows. "What, you think I don't worry?"

"Nooo," she drew out. It didn't tell him quite what she had intended, but the words to communicate what she did mean just weren't there. She settled for shaking her head and reaching out to touch his arm where he was resting it against the bed.

Automatically, he drew his arm back, thinking it was in her way, but Ziva carefully wrapped her fingers around his wrist, holding his hand in place.

Tony looked down at her hand, pale and with its fingertips still stained with blood, then back up at her. Ziva offered him a tentative, tight smile and opened her hand. Responding to her gesture, he clasped her fingers in his and gave her hand a squeeze.

Ziva sighed and leaned back against the pillows. They sat in silence, each comforted by the fact that the other was touching them.


	13. Double down

**A/N: I know, it's been a (ridiculously) long time in coming, but I haven't forgotten this story. While I can't promise I'll be any quicker at delivering the next chapter than I was with this one, I'm certainly going to try my best to keep the momentum going, if only because I, like all of you, want to find out wtf is going on and who's sending people to kill Ziva!**

* * *

McGee shifted his weight in the plastic chair outside Ziva's hospital room and rubbed his eyes. This two a.m. guard shift wasn't getting any easier, no matter how uncomfortable he tried to make himself to keep from drifting off. Opening the door a crack, he poked his head inside. "Psst. Abby."

Abby, her dark hair and clothes blending into the shadows next to Ziva's bed, raised her head and yawned. "What?" she whispered back, leaning forward.

"I can't keep my eyes open, here. Can you go get me some coffee?"

Sighing, Abby stood up and crossed to the door as quietly as she could, glancing back over her shoulder at where Ziva slept. "It's got to be three in the morning, Timmy! Do you really need _coffee _right now?"

He turned his hands up helplessly. "I do if you want me to be awake enough to be any use here."

"Well, why don't you go get your _own_ coffee, then?"

McGee sighed. "Because I'm the one with the gun, Abby," he explained, not for the first time that night. "There's no point me wandering off and leaving you and Ziva alone when neither of you has a weapon."

Abby snorted. "Ziva _is _a weapon."

"Not right now, she's not."

"Besides, you left us alone when you had to pee. If it's really that unsafe, you shouldn't even have done -"

"Ziva was awake then, Abby. Even from the bed, she can handle a gun, but not if she's got painkillers and sleeping pills on board and it's the middle of the night. Which is why I haven't gotten out of this chair since dinnertime. Now would you _please _go get me something with caffeine in it?"

Still grumbling, Abby stood up and slipped through the door. "Fine, but you have to sit inside then. I don't want her to wake up and think no one's there!"

McGee obliged, although he privately though that Ziva was in no danger of waking up and panicking just because she had no one to hold her hand. "Good?" he whispered as he settled into the chair that was still warm from Abby's body heat.

Satisfied, she nodded, smiled at him, and turned to head toward the 24-hour cafe that served the hospital's most desperate visitors.

With a sigh, McGee leaned back in his new seat and looked over at Ziva's sleeping face. The room was mostly dark, but the variety of multicolored lights on the equipment that was monitoring her provided enough light for him to make out her slack features. She was really and truly down for the count, he decided, and realized with a mild start that this was perhaps the first chance he had ever had to examine her without fear for his life. She looked much younger than he was used to, lying under the white sheets with her skin almost as pale as the bedclothes and her face relaxed. There was always a thin film of tension over her features when she was awake, but that was gone now.

He was leaning over to sneak a better look at what he could see of her bald spot - another thing he'd never get to check out without being punched in the daytime - when he heard the light _snick _that indicated the door unlatching. "Thank god," he began, turning to pick Abby out of the darkness. "I'm about to fall - Abby?"

The figure silhouetted in the doorway was far too broad to be Abby, he realized mid-sentence, and stopped. _It must be her doctor_, he thought fleetingly before common sense asserted itself and informed him that doctors did not do their rounds at 3 o'clock in the morning. Tensing, he closed his mouth and reached for the gun at his belt. "Can I help you?" he asked to cover the sound of his weapon pulling free from its holster. He hoped that the shadows that concealed the visitor's face were serving him just as well.

The dark figure started slightly, and McGee wondered if he hadn't known that anyone else would be in the room with Ziva. "Terribly sorry," a male voice finally came out of the doorway, light and British-accented. "I hadn't realized Miss David had a companion. I'm just here to check that her IV line is secure - no need for the lights," he broke off as McGee reached for the switch at Ziva's bedside. "I've been doing this quite long enough to do it by touch alone. Helps to avoid disturbing the patients."

Nevertheless, McGee flipped on the lamp, narrowing his eyes as he did it to keep from being blinded by the light.

Newly-illuminated, McGee and Danny Weiss stared at each other for a second before Weiss broke the tableau and lunged for him. McGee threw his weight to the side, inadvertently toppling his chair as he tried to avoid the other man's grip. He and his gun clattered to the floor noisily. Scrambling, he got his feet back under him just as Weiss came within striking distance and, doing the only thing he could think of, McGee pistoned his legs, half-standing and driving his head into the other man's stomach.

The air whooshed out of Weiss's lungs, but he managed to get his hands over McGee's shoulders to support himself and avoided going down completely. For the moment, supporting himself was all he was doing, but McGee felt his hands begin to close as he realized that he could easily strangle McGee from this position. McGee still had hold of his gun, but couldn't bring it to bear in the close quarters they were in. Again evading in the only way he could think of, McGee ducked, pulling his support out from under Weiss, who collapsed to the floor, still trying to recover from the head-butt McGee had dealt him.

"_Ma..." _muttered a groggy voice from the bed. Surprised, both men paused in their combat to look at Ziva, who was struggling to pull herself up on her elbows in bed. "_Ma ze?" _Through the haze of painkillers, she managed to pry her eyes open and stare without understanding at the two men in front of her, who stared owlishly back at her. Before either of them could do anything, her eyes had drifted closed and, still muttering in Hebrew, she had fallen back against the pillows and lost consciousness again.

Weiss, with the quicker reaction, jumped to his feet and grabbed for McGee again. Reflexively, McGee pulled the trigger of his gun, not bothering to aim.

A shot boomed into the darkness, the muzzle flash illuminating the shock on Weiss's face as a bullet plowed into his shoulder. Not seeming to take the time to register the pain of the wound, he clapped a hand over it and darted toward the bed, his free hand out and reaching for Ziva. He was obviously panicked, though, and as he tried to rush past McGee, McGee flung his arm out and neatly clotheslined him. As if in a cartoon, Weiss's upper body stayed still while his lower half kept moving. His feet went out from under him and he did a neat pratfall onto his backside. A hollow pop-splash issued from under him, as if he'd landed on a water balloon, and he skidded to a hard stop against the wall adjacent Ziva's bed, under the room's only window.

Secure in having the upper hand now, McGee lowered his arm, pointed his gun at Weiss, and advanced. "What's the point of this, Danny? Who sent you?"

Weiss, eyes wide, looked from McGee to the window and then, in an instant, seemed to make a decision. He leapt to his feet and threw himself through the second-story hospital window before McGee could even react to the look on his face.

McGee grabbed for the other man's retreating feet as the glass shattered, but gravity was a formidable opponent and all he got was a palmful of shattered heavy-duty glass as Weiss slipped through his fingers. Automatically, he planted his hands on the windowsill, preparing to give chase, and it struck him only just before he jumped through the window that they were in a second-story room. The assassin had somehow flung himself down to the courtyard below and kept moving, for there was no sign of a shattered body beneath the window, but McGee knew that if he attempted the same thing he'd likely end up dead.

Cursing, McGee lowered his gun and turned to look at Ziva, who continued to sleep peacefully. He reached out to check her, then drew his hand back as a drop of blood spattered down onto her sheets. Dumbly, he turned him palm up to find the source and realized he'd cut his hand on the window glass.

"McGee?" a thin voice said from the doorway.

He whirled, raising his gun defensively, to find Abby staring at him in horror. "Abby -"

"What _happened?" _Abby demanded. One of the cups she was holding slipped unnoticed out of her hand and hit the ground, sending up a spray of what McGee hoped was Caf-Pow and not hot coffee. "What did you _do_?"

Sighing, he lowered his gun. "Not me. I - wait." Still trying to process the events of the last minute, he turned his back on her and went to look out the window again, sure he must simply have missed seeing Weiss's body in the courtyard. But still there was no sign of the man, only a pile of dark-tinged glass where Weiss must have landed before he fled. "He's gone, damn it!"

"_Who's _gone?"

"Weiss!"

"Who?"

"The guy who - _damn _it!" he cursed again, holstering his gun. "Call Gibbs and Tony."

"Now?"

"Yes!" he snapped, whirling on her. "Danny Weiss just tried to sneak in here and get at Ziva, so _yes_, if you don't mind I think we need to call in some goddamn backup!"

Abby's lip trembled as she looked from him to Ziva. "I'm sorry! I just . . . I heard the gunshot and I came running and then all I saw was you, and - is she ok?" she interrupted herself sharply. "Did he hurt her?"

McGee shook his head. "No, I don't think so. He never got close to her, and she slept through the whole thing, believe it or not. Now, please." He grabbed the surviving coffee cup from her hand just as she absently started to let go of it. "Call Gibbs. I don't want to start following Weiss's trail just so some other guy can waltz in and kill Ziva _and _you. We need more people. Now, I'm going to go find a nurse or something who can double-check that Ziva's ok."

Abby nodded and fumbled to pull her phone out of her pocket. It took her three tries, and she realized with a grimace that her hands were shaking. She wiped her palms on her skirt, steadied the phone with one hand, and dialed tentatively with the other. Her call was answered on the first ring by a rough voice, and she sucked in a shaky breath and managed to say, "Gibbs? Gibbs, we need you here. Now."

"Coming," was all Gibbs bothered to say in reply before the connection went dead.

Swallowing convulsively, Abby pocketed her phone again and moved to stand near Ziva. She took one of the other woman's limp hands in hers, lowered her head, and tried not to picture the scene that she had only just missed.


End file.
